Live data from Hacker News

Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When AI Bubble Bursts

asymco.com

71–80 of 91 posts

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When AI Bubble Bursts

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge crowd of "wishful thinkers" that want to see AI collapse and will cling to any rationalization that it will do so. This is Zitron's audience.

How exactly is AI "succeeding?" By the numbers, every AI company is on a fast track to going bankrupt at record speeds. All while burning the planet down and making electronics unavailable to literally everyone. This is not sustainable. Keep a close eye on the "Is AI Profitable Yet?" website. The numbers will open your eyes. Please, enlighten me on how AI is successful.

Anthropic's Q2 was allegedly profitable, and OpenAI is allegedly pretty close to profitability.

Spending way more money than you earn is pretty common for startups anyways, "going bankrupt" is a silly thing to say when the whole point is to spend more than you earn

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When AI Bubble Bursts

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge crowd of "wishful thinkers" that want to see AI collapse and will cling to any rationalization that it will do so. This is Zitron's audience.

How exactly is AI "succeeding?" By the numbers, every AI company is on a fast track to going bankrupt at record speeds. All while burning the planet down and making electronics unavailable to literally everyone. This is not sustainable. Keep a close eye on the "Is AI Profitable Yet?" website. The numbers will open your eyes. Please, enlighten me on how AI is successful.

Anthropic is profitable, running at ~$75B ARR, and has 80+% gross margin on their API products.

OpenAI is not yet profitable, but is running at ~40B ARR and their revenue is growing rapidly at >200% YoY.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When AI Bubble Bursts

#73

Ed Zitron also said that consumers were losing interest in ChatGPT in January 2024, that AI models were reaching their upper possible limits in Feburary 2024, that ChatGPT and similar products were "not particularly useful for anything", that hallucinations could not possibly be reduced in models, etc. He's a churlish AI skeptic that isn't worth listening to.

He's been mostly wrong about the potential for AI, but mostly right about the financials. Don't listen to him for opinions, but don't discount his factual reporting because his opinions are off.

For someone like Ed, it feels like way too much effort to wade through the muck.

I personally can't stand anything that whiffs of "outrage content" . Doubly so if they are stupendously wrong on a regular basis. Triply so if they never own up to those bad calls.

If someone else wants to get their hands dirty, more power to them. I'll wait for anything useful to filter through other sources.

Life is short, and there's so much other high quality material I'd rather give my limited attention to.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When AI Bubble Bursts

#74
post #29

Ed Zitron also said that consumers were losing interest in ChatGPT in January 2024, that AI models were reaching their upper possible limits in Feburary 2024, that ChatGPT and similar products were "not particularly useful for anything", that hallucinations could not possibly be reduced in models, etc. He's a churlish AI skeptic that isn't worth listening to.

Zed publishes usage metrics for AI and they are trending down: https://zed.dev/agent-metrics

More people are probably using stuff like Claude Code, Codex etc from the CLI or desktop apps, meaning they’re actually using more AI and skipping Zed altogether

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When AI Bubble Bursts

#75

Ed Zitron also said that consumers were losing interest in ChatGPT in January 2024, that AI models were reaching their upper possible limits in Feburary 2024, that ChatGPT and similar products were "not particularly useful for anything", that hallucinations could not possibly be reduced in models, etc. He's a churlish AI skeptic that isn't worth listening to.

People still believe that the model intelligence has plateaud and I feel like they live under the rocks. I get the insane capex spend, I get the hype, I even get certain company will go under but to ignore the capability jump in a year is absurd.

It hasn't plateaud but the generational leaps are definitely getting smaller.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When AI Bubble Bursts

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly is AI "succeeding?" By the numbers, every AI company is on a fast track to going bankrupt at record speeds. All while burning the planet down and making electronics unavailable to literally everyone. This is not sustainable. Keep a close eye on the "Is AI Profitable Yet?" website. The numbers will open your eyes. Please, enlighten me on how AI is successful.

AI would be profitable today if all companies weren't constantly racing to train the next biggest model, that's the whole reason the numbers look whack. This is basically the first time we're seeing true competition between massive tech companies, the previous state had each one of them clinging on to their own separate monopoly.

And if the training stops, the existing LLM models will fairly quickly decay in usefulness.

There's no free steady-state of high-quality current models for this; it's either keep investing forever or deal with models that stopped gaining new information in 202X.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When AI Bubble Bursts

#77

Stock valuation has nothing to do with AI being the most transformational tech ever devised. Like who can't grasp that

I don't think LLMs can approach, in terms of transformational power, writing, printing, or even the personal computer, but I get what you're saying.

Almost all Nobel laureates of AI disagree with you but ok I get what you are saying

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When AI Bubble Bursts

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's been mostly wrong about the potential for AI, but mostly right about the financials. Don't listen to him for opinions, but don't discount his factual reporting because his opinions are off.

I am very impressed with LLMs, but..... I don't think we are seeing productivity gains due to LLMs in the general economy yet. Even in software development, are we seeing an increase in the number of products or features shipped?

I agree. I think LLMs do make specific tasks much faster (like typing code), but these tasks usually make up a small amount of people's actual work.

What I mostly meant was that Ed's view on LLMs is that they won't get much better than they are now, which—so far—has been incorrect every time he made the point. I also think he puts too much weight on things like hallucinations, which aren't much of an issue for many applications of LLMs.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When AI Bubble Bursts

#79

Stock valuation has nothing to do with AI being the most transformational tech ever devised. Like who can't grasp that

It's absurd to call LLMs the most transformational tech ever devised. At a bare minimum , computers in general and electricity both beat out LLMs, as they are prerequisites.

Electricity and computers can't solve new math and physics nor make us immortal and drive humanity to the next step.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When AI Bubble Bursts

#80

Ed Zitron also said that consumers were losing interest in ChatGPT in January 2024, that AI models were reaching their upper possible limits in Feburary 2024, that ChatGPT and similar products were "not particularly useful for anything", that hallucinations could not possibly be reduced in models, etc. He's a churlish AI skeptic that isn't worth listening to.

People still believe that the model intelligence has plateaud and I feel like they live under the rocks. I get the insane capex spend, I get the hype, I even get certain company will go under but to ignore the capability jump in a year is absurd.

The only honest benchmark is "has it cured cancer yet?". It has not, nor moved close to doing so.

People are doing great at marketing the diminishing returns as breakthroughs though.

Post reply on HN