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Is it a bubble?

oaktreecapital.com

61–70 of 605 posts

Re: Is it a bubble?

#61

Why is so much invested in AI but not in fusion power?

There are a lot of areas that could use more investment but aren't getting it. The way this works is complicated. The best explanation comes from really understanding Moore's Law. The main effect of the law was really about investment, about securing investment into semiconductor fabs rather than anywhere else.

See, every fab costs double what the previous generation did (current ones run roughly 20 gigadollars per factory). And you need to build a new fab every couple of years. But, if you can keep your order book full, you can make a profit on that fab- you can get good ROI on the investment and pay the money people back nicely. But you need to go to the markets to raise money for that next generation fab because it costs twice what your previous generation did and you didn't get that much free cash from your previous generation. And the money men wouldn't want to give it to you, of course. But thanks to Moore's Law you can pitch it as inevitable, if you don't borrow the money to build the new fab, then your competitors will. And so they would give you the money for the new fab because it says right on this paper that in another two years the transistors will double.

Right now, that "it's inevitable, our competitors will get there if we don't" argument works on VCs if you are pitching LLM's or LLM based things. And it doesn't work as well if you are pitching battery technology, fusion power, or other areas. And that's why the investments are going to AI.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#62

> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?

The line right after this is much worse: > Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level, something that wasn’t so just a year ago. Wow, finance people certainly don't understand programming.

[deleted]

Re: Is it a bubble?

#63
post #51

"Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level". Once I hit that line, I stopped reading. This tells me this person didn't do proper research on this matter.

I recently had ChatGPT refactor an entire mathematical graph rendering logic that I wrote in vanilla js, and had it rewrite it as GLSL. It took about an hour overall (required a few prompts). That is world-class level in my opinion.

If I tell people that I can write programming code at world-class level and in some of my reviews I make junior mistakes, I make out functions or dependencies that do not exist or I am unable to learn from my mistakes, I would be put on PIP immediately. And after a while, fired. This is the standard LLMs should be held up against when you use the word "world class".

Re: Is it a bubble?

#64

> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?

[deleted]

Re: Is it a bubble?

#65
post #50
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI writes most of the code for most new YC companies, as of this year.

So they don't own the copyright to most of their code? What's the value then?

They do. Where did you get this? All the providers have clauses like this:

"4.1. Generally. Customer and Customer’s End Users may provide Input and receive Output. As between Customer and OpenAI, to the extent permitted by applicable law, Customer: (a) retains all ownership rights in Input; and (b) owns all Output. OpenAI hereby assigns to Customer all OpenAI’s right, title, and interest, if any, in and to Output."

https://openai.com/policies/services-agreement/

Re: Is it a bubble?

#68

> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?

The line right after this is much worse: > Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level, something that wasn’t so just a year ago. Wow, finance people certainly don't understand programming.

They don’t. I’ve gone from rickety and slow excel sheets and maybe some python functions to automate small things that I can figure out to building out entire data pipelines. It’s incredible how much more efficient we’ve gotten.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not. And if your team is doing this you're not "advanced." Lots of people are outing themselves these days about the complexity of their jobs, or lack thereof. Which is great! But it's not a +1 for AI, it's a -1 for them.

Part of the issue is that I think you are underestimating the number of people not doing "advanced" programming. If it's around ~80-90%, then that's a lot of +1s for AI

[deleted]

Re: Is it a bubble?

#70

The post script was pretty sobering. It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. This is a pretty depressing place to be, because most emerging technologies provide us with exciting new possibilities whereas this technology seems only exciting for management stressed about payroll. It's true that the technology currently works as an e…

> It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. Same here, and I think it's because I feel like a craftsman. I thoroughly enjoy the process of thinking deeply about what I will build, breaking down the work into related chunks, and of course writing the code itself. It's like magic when it all comes together. Sometimes I can't even beli…

It's been blowing my mind reading HN the past year or so and seeing so many comments from programmers that are excited to not have to write code. It's depressing.
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