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AI is slowing down

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691–700 of 820 posts

Re: AI is slowing down

#691
post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to at least refer to some sources why?

That has been covered to death since months, there is no good solution to cooling without an atmosphere. But even going into the technical details is a waste of time, think about how complicated maintaining such a system in space would be compared to having it on earth, the whole idea is a complete grift from beginning to end. There is literally no benefit to do it in space other than as a marketing tool. Nobody who…

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Re: AI is slowing down

#692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an economic perspective productivity is defined as the creation of value isn't it? Then if you "improve productivity" and does not create value in the end you're no improving productivity at all.

Productivity is defined revenue per worker hour. And we know worker hours are going down as there are fewer workers with the layoffs.

Which is why modern management thinks firing everyone in your factory and selling the inventory in your warehouse is amazingly productive.

Re: AI is slowing down

#693

Ed Zitron with his subpar takes again. You could kill all the major AI labs today, and even just today's open-weight models are enough to absolutely transform society, with video-game GPU stuck together at homes.

How would they transform society and why haven't they yet?

Re: AI is slowing down

#694
post #578

Lots of dismissive comments ITT, very few tackling the substance of the article. > AI Cannot Afford To Slow Down — It Needs $3 Trillion Or More In Revenue By End Of 2030 To Sustain Its Existence Is this true? With the total 2024 wages being 11.7 trillion USD [0], and nonfarm payrolls totaling 158,000 in the same year [1], it's an order of magnitude higher than my back of the napkin guesses I've made that AI needs to…

There is no substance to the article to tackle. Ed Zitron is a clown that makes seven million dollars a year writing unsubstantiated bullshit on the internet. He has been consistently wrong in every single one of his predictions and will continue predicting the sky is falling, because his content has zero educational value. It is purely a confirmation-bias inducing dopamine hit for the perpetually aggrieved.

I am unfamiliar with his work, can you provide sources for his past incorrect predictions?

Re: AI is slowing down

#695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the source for that "makes seven million dollars a year" claim?

Probably this: [1] 80k * $7/month * 12 months/year = $6.7M/year [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/19/ed-zitron...

wrong math: usually 1-5% of subscribers are paying customers.

Re: AI is slowing down

#696

Ed Zitron with his subpar takes again. You could kill all the major AI labs today, and even just today's open-weight models are enough to absolutely transform society, with video-game GPU stuck together at homes.

From what I've seen lately, Ed isn't saying the technology isn't significant. He criticizes the fact that AI companies are dumping this kind of money into it with circular financing deals. If it goes like you say, (GPUs at home) the AI labs will be destroyed, because no one will need the inference capacity they're dumping money into when they can do the decent part at home. From what I've seen he says it's more "not worth the investment" rather than not a breakthrough. It just sucks compared to the trillions they're spending which they'll never recover, is the argument. But I guess it's easier to strawman the argument to "this stuff isn't going to change anything".

Re: AI is slowing down

#697
post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anecdotally, I have not seen an explosion in quality/bespoke software since LLMs. In fact I've noticed the opposite to quite the extreme. Not only are new products worse in quality, but the quality of existing products is falling off a cliff. This is the big one. It's clear that AI can generate huge volumes of code by KLOC. It is not clear that spending a lot of money tokenmaxxing will eventually result in increase…

Have been thinking about this a lot recently. AI could be an absolute game changer for a small start-up rushing a product to market – you could quickly build an MVP that would take years and tens of hires before. But how much ROI is there for large businesses with established products and huge development teams burning through tokens making subtle tweaks that can’t be directly tied to revenue?

Not much ROI, if any. My employer's been making some studies and come up with very modest productivity gains - so of course they want us all to use it, but I'm not sure they're taking the true costs into account. Especially not once token pricing actually reflects reality, and we all get brain rot from using the things instead of thinking. If this thing doesn't collapse before we can run a solid coding assistant model on a developer's machine, maybe it's got some legs.

That doesn't seem very likely.

The legacy of LLMs will live on in various models doing various specialist things (they seem like a really good progression on speech synthesis for example) but the current edifice will come crashing down and if we're very very very lucky they won't take the global economy with it.

Re: AI is slowing down

#698
post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no substance to the article to tackle. Ed Zitron is a clown that makes seven million dollars a year writing unsubstantiated bullshit on the internet. He has been consistently wrong in every single one of his predictions and will continue predicting the sky is falling, because his content has zero educational value. It is purely a confirmation-bias inducing dopamine hit for the perpetually aggrieved.

Hypothetically speaking, how does one go about being so handsomely rewarded for being wrong about everything? I feel like I am well qualified for this type of job.

Not in the divine secrets, never heard of that person before, but my wild guess would be have the relevant people in your acquaintances?

Re: AI is slowing down

#699

Ed Zitron with his subpar takes again. You could kill all the major AI labs today, and even just today's open-weight models are enough to absolutely transform society, with video-game GPU stuck together at homes.

The internet transformed society. That didn't save us from the .com bubble bursting.

Re: AI is slowing down

#700
Am I missing something or does the author not count the existing revenue to cover the buildout? I think they have it covered even in the worst case scenario (and requiring every piece of cash flow they have).

Also, if Anthropic or OpenAI fail in their revenue requirements I believe they would be absorbed by the guys with the money printing machines (Google, Microsoft and Meta).

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