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How the AI Bubble Bursts

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Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#531

Post by naravara »

hbn wrote: post #391
naravara wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The impetus to continue training at the pace they are is driven by the competition. So if the money starts drying up, then they’ll naturally slow down because they’ll have to figure out how to do more with less. I suspect that once the models hit a point of “good enough” for certain use cases companies will start putting R&D focus in other areas that may be less expensive. Like figuring out how to run more efficientl…

> UI/UX conventions that help users get what they’re trying to accomplish in fewer steps If we can expect the past 15 years of software UI/UX history to continue, it's more likely they'll spend the money on making the UI/UX more confusing, removing features, and making basic tasks take more steps than they do today.

That’s because the past 15 years were dictated by Web 2.0 companies that make their money off keeping you glued to the screen.

A AI assistant would work more like Planet Fitness where the goal is to figure out how to convince you to keep paying them while using the facilities as little as possible.

A big part of that might just be steering you towards repos of existing solutions to the problem you’re trying to solve rather than helping you vibe code a solution yourself. Over time they’ll be able to accrue a whole pile of canned functions that’s all automatically documented and audited and it’ll be able to plug and play those rather than having to rewrite.

The security implications of this give me a headache to contemplate to be honest.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#532

Post by Mentlo »

Aurornis wrote: post #60

This article tries to build upon a lot of half-truths or incorrect facts, like this: > OpenAI is struggling to monetize. They turned to showing ads in ChatGPT, The ads aren’t going into your paid plans (except maybe a highly discounted tier, depending on the market). The ads are a play to offer a free version. Having an ad-supported free tier isn’t new. The discussion about being unprofitable also repeats the reducti…

We have strong indicators that inference is profitable on non-economically-valuable prompts. We don't have strong indicators that inference is profitable on economically valuable prompts.

As AI companies start extracting rent from the prompting, one of two things are going to collapse - either the long tail revenue base of low-value inference is going to collapse, because people won't be using Chat GPT to get a recipe if it costs them money or if it is ad-ridden; or the cost of economically-valuable inference is going to go up - and whether it goes up to economically stable positions is a toss-up.

And I say this as an AI enthusiast with <50% probability of a bubble burst in the short term.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#533

Post by atomicnumber3 »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #365
logravia wrote: post #350

The thing I am struggling with is where is the impact of LLM tools, especially given the massive increase in token consumption from 2025 to now and the saturated presence of LLMs everywhere. Naively speaking, I have so many expectations for the impact of this tech. I'd expect a noticeable uptick in applications published on Google, Apple and Microsoft app stores. I'd also expect an uptick of games published to Steam.…

Programming is a necessary but not sufficient condition for software products to exist. So while the programming has to be good, so too do many other things, like product vision, product management, project management, and of course there still needs to be feedback between all of the above so that engineering isn't implementing a misunderstood version of the product and that product isn't asking for 5 years and a PhD…

I meant 10% faster btw, typo

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#534

Post by Analemma_ »

Macha wrote: post #401
Analemma_ wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re not even close to demand saturation with tokens. Have you seen the people rending their garments with rage that Anthropic and Google won’t let them use their flat-rate subscriptions to burn millions of tokens per hour on OpenClaw? And that’s a tiny set of die-hard tinkerers. The ceiling of token use when everyone has something akin to OpenClaw just running as a background process on their phone is way higher th…

Is that not appealing to those users _because_ its a subsidised flat rate? Like those users could go and swap to API pricing right now if they wanted to, but at API pricing they don’t want to

Right, but that just proves there's tons of pent-up demand waiting in the wings as token prices fall.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#535

Post by keybored »

win311fwg wrote: post #420
keybored wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The productivity gains we've seen above the capacity of human productivity would have been impossible without tech. It absolutely was caused by tech. Would have been impossible without and being caused by are different things. The sense of being “caused by” in a political context are the people who have the power to direct things. Which are not necessarily the people who implement something. > The benefactor of tho…

> in a political context While you are right to recognize that there was some attempt to inject political context, it was not there originally, and is not the main discussion taking place. The fact that wages and productivity have become decoupled is not inherently political. It is but simple mathematics. Tech is the cause for the decoupling; it is why we have been able to become continually more productive and at an…

> While you are right to recognize that there was some attempt to inject political context, it was not there originally, and is not the main discussion taking place.

I don’t care if anyone wants political context to be there or not. Political context is not some subjective choice that the participants in a discussion can choose to be the case or not, like some alternative history exercise.

This political context (i.e. reality) called NeoLiberalism is so well-researched and argued that I can just call it NeoLiberalism and even a forum full of techheads don’t bat an eye. Which is more than can be said for your incoherent nuh-uh where both:

- Technology just determines things by itself

- And (also) the rank and file peons who implement technology could have forced something better on the world (than the pile of shit that we have)

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#536

Post by camdenreslink »

sooperserieous wrote: post #282
tapoxi wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The state of GitHub and Windows 11 certainly qualify as sub-par.

I think Github represents 'par'. Plenty of stuff worse and plenty of stuff better. Overall it's what most people expect a coding social media site to be because it set those expectations. Those of us who are only looking for code management (including issues/PRs/etc) are easily satisfied elsewhere.

It has had some really bad reliability issues recently. In terms of uptime, it has been a poor product.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#537

Post by gdilla »

Aperocky wrote: post #58
infecto wrote: post #30

It’s incredible how polarizing the AI rush is. I keep the perspective that the technology is an absolute step change but I have no idea where the cards will fall. I take a lot of issue with these style of articles. I get a sense that the authors are being overly defensive. The cost to serve tokens is absolutely profitable today and that’s been true for at least a year. What’s unclear is how R&D and capex fit into the…

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…

the busting will come from the token consumers. so many disasters waiting to happen.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#538

Post by Delphiza »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #451
pydry wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The typical person is using LLMs not at all as it pertains to their daily life tasks. This doesnt track at all with my experience. Everybody is using it everywhere. Moreover people are using them for daily life tasks even when it is not an appropriate use of LLMs - e.g. getting medical advice as you referred to or writing emails which are clearly pissing off their coworkers. In this respect I see it as akin to radiu…

> getting medical advice Id be careful stating this is an inappropriate use of LLMs. Im semi tapped in to the medical literature community and there is a lot of serious discussion and research going into the usage of LLMs for medical advice and most of it is showing that LLMs are barely worse than doctors, and much much cheaper/more convenient. They definitely arent ready to completely replace doctors, but it seems t…

I am surprised that people are surprised by this finding, and support your position.

Anecdotally, doctors get things wrong quite frequently. Almost everybody has a bad medical diagnosis/advice story. The amount of reference material that a doctor needs to know off-hand and the data that they are given to make a diagnosis makes it a really difficult job. They also seldom have the ability to know whether their diagnosis/treatment worked, so have a limited ability to 'learn' from outcomes. (I did some work for cancer research and one of the most difficult problems was trying to get 'end of treatment' data because the end of treatment was often an unknown, to the researchers, death).

The ability to have a 'prompt' that includes lab data is likely to be better than the opinions of a doctor that only has one person's professional experience, limited ability to interpret 'prompts', and needing map it to an in-memory conditions database.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#540

Post by ajross »

T-A wrote: post #441
ajross wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reality begs to differ Honestly you're both wrong. RAM prices spiked speculatively, and they're going down for the same reason. Market people always want to argue in fundamentals, when in practice *ALL* the high frequency components of the signal are down to a bunch of traders trying to guess where it's going in the short term. At best those guesses are informed by ground truth ("AI needs a lot of RAM!" "Sam corner…

> RAM prices spiked speculatively, and they're going down for the same reason. https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ Note how flat the black lines are. Then note how wide the gray bands are. That makes it very easy to cherry-pick a few examples to present as "supporting evidence" that prices are doing whatever you want to believe they are doing.

FWIW, you're misreading that chart. It shows a wild increase in memory prices, no matter how much you try to cherry pick.

An example might help: in July of last year I bought exactly this 2x32 DDR5 kit for $141: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DSR14511

It's showing $999 now, which seems about median for similarly-spec'd memory on Amazon. The cheapest slot-and-capacity-compatible equivalent I can find is around $570, even. So 3-5x increase, at minimum.

It's true that that's a high error bar. It's absolutely not true that the trend is ambiguous.

Can you cherry pick me a $141 kit, please? I mean, it's not an abstract question! I'd buy it from you right now if you had it or could get it, in whatever quantity you can source. No joke.

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