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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#521

Post by CuriouslyC »

sumeno wrote: post #343
mike_hearn wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP but Zitron makes clear errors: • He seems to think that the moment Nvidia release new hardware, all existing hardware becomes worthless. It doesn't and there are plenty of tokens being served by old GPUs. This makes all his calculations about how quickly datacenters have to pay off useless. • All his numbers about costs, revenues etc are guesses or attempts to work backwards from off the cuff and frequentl…

They don't immediately become worthless, but they don't last all that long either https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/datacenter-g...

This doesn't match my experience, in academia I saw ~40-45% utilization NVIDIA GPU clusters that went 6 years with <20% failure rate. Might be a TPU thing?

Re: AI is slowing down

#522

Post by overgard »

simonw wrote: post #132

Ed's argument for why "AI is slowing down" rests on company spending caps, in particular the Uber $1,500/engineer/tool cap. I interpret the exact same evidence in the opposite direction. A year ago the idea that a company would spend $1,500/month/employee on AI tooling felt absurd, what could people possible want to do with AI that would cost that much? Then coding agents (and, increasingly, general purpose agents) h…

Saying its going to be 1500 a month across the board is highly speculative. How many companies can even demonstrate that they're getting more than 18000 dollars a year in surplus value per employee by using this tech?

Re: AI is slowing down

#523

Post by JacobAsmuth »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #418
josh-sematic wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Divide both by 12 then and you have monthly revenues. The ratio between them remains the same and remains rather astonishing.

Dividing by 12 you still have the same problem. They're projected numbers as opposed to real ones as well as being grossly skewed by any short term fluctuations.

Divide both by 12 and you do not get the projected numbers. You get monthly revenue, a real measured number. It is the number being reported * 12 when they state a new ARR.

E.g. When Anthropic stated $1B ARR (an extrapolated value) what they were actually reporting is $(1/12)B Monthly revenue. If it helps their current monthly revenue is 47 times that, for a grand total of $(47/12)B per month in revenue.

Re: AI is slowing down

#524

Post by overgard »

bawolff wrote: post #500
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguing against the business model is a method of exposing the tactics of AI businesses as a short term grift rather than a principled venture. The entire economy suffers when grifters profit - there’s not infinite money to spread around.

Is it really a grift when everyone knows? Its not like they are keeping their financials secret. Heck, the main AI companies aren't even public yet, so its largely sophisticated investors getting "grifted". Normally a grift involves tricking someone. The AI situation seems more like a bunch of investors knowingly investing in something very speculative. If they lose their money, while that is the nature of speculativ…

Elon Musk just got the rules of the NASDAQ changed so he can more or less force index funds to buy his shell company and take money from people's 401k. Feels very grifty to me.

Re: AI is slowing down

#525

Post by sabretooth1405 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #390
cmiles74 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't read Ed Zitron, aside from when he appears here on Hacker News, and I also find his tone to be over-the-top. I think we might agree on that much. These articles are lengthy but, to my understanding, Ed's idea is... * AI companies have committed to purchasing X amount of compute * Data centers are being constructed to meet this demand, they'll need to charge amount Y * AI companies do not have sufficient reven…

> personally the only real use-case for AI that I've seen is code generation or automated sales or scam calls. That seems like a giant paucity of imagination. I can easily name a lot of areas where AI is already having a large impact and it's not hard to imagine the impact growing: 1. Customer service. Yes, we all like to laugh at the silly chatbot mistakes, linked list reversals and Instagram oopsies, but a lot of c…

Everyone I know hates AI customer service. A couple of prominent food delivery apps here in India switched to AI chatbot customer services and it’s been horrible since then. It’s been almost impossible to get refunds since then, even when there’s straight up fraud involved without screaming ok twitter.

Now ofc it can be said that they haven’t implemented it properly but at some point it needs to be considered that why isn’t no one figuring it out?

Re: AI is slowing down

#526

Post by JacobAsmuth »

vb-8448 wrote: post #96

Zitron is in the business of content creation and not successful predictions . It doesn't matter how many times he (and several others around) will say the end is here , they have to be right only once. BTW, one thing for sure he is right about are the economics, as of today there is no way these massive investments are gone be paid.

Now that you mention it, has Ed ever made a single testable prediction that came true?

Re: AI is slowing down

#527

Post by throwaway27448 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #347
irishcoffee wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider myself of average intelligence, and I see this coming. Maybe I assume too much.

Every government has complete control on how much of their money exists. If it disappears from the private finance market, it can compensate with any amount it wishes.

It would be better to lean into inflation and just dump a ton of money into the bottom of the market to dilute the top. Of course this only makes sense if the government is willing to regulate market control, which it has demonstrated time and time again it will not.

Re: AI is slowing down

#529

Post by reasonableklout »

overgard wrote: post #507
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #35

Ed is an interesting character. His financial analysis of the AI industry makes logical sense to me (though I am not knowledgeable enough to actually know if it is correct .) However, he seems to be so angry at AI in general, that he misses the obvious areas where LLMs are actually changing the State of the Art. Coding seems to be one of the core use-cases for LLMs (as Simon Willison pointed out recently) and even if…

So here's the thing. I am not generally an angry person. But Ed's writing really resonates with me, because for the last four years these people have been making a strategy of scaring the shit out of us while trying to ruin something I genuinely love (coding), while simultaneously fucking up the economy and multiple industries and turning the internet into slop. I very badly want more people to call these guys "chuck…

> Almost every programmer I know personally has a pretty measured opinion on where these things are useful and where they're not. The breathless hype seems mostly from non coders.

We have polar opposite media bubbles. I see OG programmers all over my timeline either grieving the "end of software engineering" (a la Ryan Dahl) or extolling "automatic programming" (a la antirez).

Re: AI is slowing down

#530

Post by JacobAsmuth »

overgard wrote: post #522
simonw wrote: post #132

Ed's argument for why "AI is slowing down" rests on company spending caps, in particular the Uber $1,500/engineer/tool cap. I interpret the exact same evidence in the opposite direction. A year ago the idea that a company would spend $1,500/month/employee on AI tooling felt absurd, what could people possible want to do with AI that would cost that much? Then coding agents (and, increasingly, general purpose agents) h…

Saying its going to be 1500 a month across the board is highly speculative. How many companies can even demonstrate that they're getting more than 18000 dollars a year in surplus value per employee by using this tech?

How speculative would it have been to say that it was anything more than $20/mo back in November?
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