Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me

petewarden.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 65 posts

Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me

#51

Post by _wire_ »

OutOfHere wrote: post #45
derf_ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teach them basic financial literacy. The time value of money, the power of compounding, the relationship between risk and expected returns. Grade school does not cover any of this. It does not matter what your income is if you cannot budget and save.

Financial literacy is a red herring. If one only stores their savings in gold or an index fund, that gets them practically all the way there. It takes all of two minutes to teach it. It compounds itself. Risk too is sort of a red herring. Just buy in whenever it dips, and you are set. Diversify just enough to dilute the aggregate risk, and it practically disappears. Savings are not even possible with low income, only…

Yes, keep focused on the future, deny the moment. Avoid testing your own experience about what waste and excess mean. Follow the herd and treat participation algorithmically. Buy in. All key points for a satisfying life well lived.

Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me

#52

Post by derwiki »

bathtub365 wrote: post #50
OutOfHere wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Financial literacy is a red herring. If one only stores their savings in gold or an index fund, that gets them practically all the way there. It takes all of two minutes to teach it. It compounds itself. Risk too is sort of a red herring. Just buy in whenever it dips, and you are set. Diversify just enough to dilute the aggregate risk, and it practically disappears. Savings are not even possible with low income, only…

Plenty of people have bought what they thought was the dip, only to watch an instrument go to almost zero and never recover. Look at Bed Bath and Beyond. It’s not quite that simple.

Time in the market beats timing the market. But we’re also probably talking about broad index funds and not BB&B stock.

Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me

#53

Post by zyx321 »

danielscrubs wrote: post #15
neffy wrote: post #8

If they optimize though - and this is coming at some point - local AI becomes possible, and their entire business case as a cloud monopoly evaporates. I think they know they're in a race between centralized control, and widespread use and control, and that is what is really driving this.

Yes, if you see the LLM as a compressed dictionary of all available information. But if they succeed with agentic reasoning models (we are absolutly not there yet) then I think meritocracy will be replaced with assetocracy. The better the model, the more expensive it will be and the better the software will be. I don’t worry about it myself, but I do worry for my kids. Im not even sure what to teach them anymore to h…

>assetocracy

That's an interesting neologism, but the existing term for "rule by whoever controls the most expensive assets" is "capitalism"

Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me

#54

Post by NebulaStorm456 »

Modified3019 wrote: post #37
NebulaStorm456 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people who are experts in a generalist sense. When a new field opens up, they quickly snatch up the opportunity and make immense progress and name for themselves in the evolving field. So in this case the first author is the mouse who ate the cheese and died.

>is the mouse who ate the cheese and died. I don’t follow what this means

Sorry, I should have said he died in the process of getting the cheese while the second mouse got the cheese.

The phrase "the second mouse gets the cheese" means that it can be beneficial to let others take the initial risk, as the first to act might trigger a negative outcome, leaving the opportunity for the second person to succeed without the same danger. I

Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me

#55

Post by JohnBooty »

zyx321 wrote: post #53
danielscrubs wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if you see the LLM as a compressed dictionary of all available information. But if they succeed with agentic reasoning models (we are absolutly not there yet) then I think meritocracy will be replaced with assetocracy. The better the model, the more expensive it will be and the better the software will be. I don’t worry about it myself, but I do worry for my kids. Im not even sure what to teach them anymore to h…

>assetocracy That's an interesting neologism, but the existing term for "rule by whoever controls the most expensive assets" is "capitalism"

You can spend $100B on a assets but it doesn't mean you'll turn a profit.

Capitalism certainly favors those with the most... capital, but there are quite a few other factors. Market fit, efficiency, etc. The Dutch East India Company had the most assets, yes, but also the best ships and a killer (literally) business model.

The notion of a sector where success is determined almost entirely by who can stockpile the most assets (GPUs in this case) is a somewhat unique situation and probably merits its own term

Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me

#56

Post by JohnBooty »

kragen wrote: post #40

This is very insightful. I remember the epoch of clueless startups wasting venture capital on Sun servers. I worked at one of those startups. Warden is clearly correct that if you want to train your AI faster then the optimal amount to spend on software optimization is at least a substantial fraction of your hardware budget. However, clueless people who don't know how to optimize probably don't know where to spend mo…

    the optimal amount to spend on software optimization 
    is at least a substantial fraction of your hardware budget.
This has been a banging-head-against-wall sort of struggle every place I've worked on software, without AI even coming into the picture.

At one startup they were spending millions of dollars on AWS and complaining loudly to us about AWS spend and yet... god forbid the engineering team devote any resources to optimization passes instead of rolling out more poorly considered features, and hiring more engineers, because the existing engineers are struggling to be productive because everything is so unoptimized, and also because they have to spend a bunch of their time interviewing and training new hires.

Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me

#57

Post by OutOfHere »

bathtub365 wrote: post #50
OutOfHere wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Financial literacy is a red herring. If one only stores their savings in gold or an index fund, that gets them practically all the way there. It takes all of two minutes to teach it. It compounds itself. Risk too is sort of a red herring. Just buy in whenever it dips, and you are set. Diversify just enough to dilute the aggregate risk, and it practically disappears. Savings are not even possible with low income, only…

Plenty of people have bought what they thought was the dip, only to watch an instrument go to almost zero and never recover. Look at Bed Bath and Beyond. It’s not quite that simple.

If you buy junk with all of your money, that's on you. I mentioned gold and (broad) index funds, although a few select cryptocurrencies also work. Buying junk must be restricted to a very small amounts only, to what one is willing to risk.

Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me

#58

Post by _heimdall »

Coffeewine wrote: post #32
_heimdall wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the author is making the point that the companies spending all this money on hardware aren't concerned at all with how the hardware is actually used. Optimization isn't even being considered because its the total cost spent on hardware that is the goal, not output from the hardware.

I slightly have trouble believing that Mr “Stop wasting tokens by saying please to LLMs” Altman is not considering how his models can be optimized. I suppose the real question is how accurate are the utilization numbers in the article.

I stopped paying attention to any specific thing Sam Altman says a while ago. I've seen too many examples of interviews or off the cuff interactions that make me think very little of him personally.

For example, I could see him saying not to waste tokens on "please" simply because he thinks that is a stupid way to use the LLM. I.e. a judgement on anyone that would say please, not a concern over token use in his data centers.

Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me

#59

Post by _heimdall »

epolanski wrote: post #28
_heimdall wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the author is making the point that the companies spending all this money on hardware aren't concerned at all with how the hardware is actually used. Optimization isn't even being considered because its the total cost spent on hardware that is the goal, not output from the hardware.

But can that really be the case? It takes a long time to train and tune the models, any small, even low % digit of squeezing more implies much faster iteration.

Until investors specifically incentivize speed or cost for the next iteration I wouldn't expect them to optimize for efficiency.

Right now it seems investment is primarily based on vibes, media hype, and total spend on hardware and infrastructure.

Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me

#60

Post by keeda »

danaris wrote: post #46
jstummbillig wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being the CEO of a notable publicly traded company (and liable if caught lying about what they do with billions of shareholders dollars) surely a little more than random HN commentator without sources...?

And just when was the last time you saw CEO of a company as big as Microsoft "caught lying to shareholders" about anything actually face any punishment? CEOs of big public companies lie to their shareholders all the time . It would be fantastic if they could be held accountable for those lies, but AFAIK when the SEC has tried, they always weasel out of it by saying things like "well, from what I knew at the time , it…

> And just when was the last time you saw CEO of a company as big as Microsoft "caught lying to shareholders" about anything actually face any punishment?

Actually curious, when was the last time we saw a CEO of a company as big as Microsoft caught lying to shareholders?

The one instance I can recall offhand of big companies doing fraud were cases like Enron, which resulted in execs going to jail. More recent cases of CEOs were not large companies and they also ended up with them in prison, e.g. Nikola. (Sure the guy's out again, but that's been done, uh, outside the usual process of justice.)

Post reply on HN