Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

721–730 of 1001 posts

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#721

Post by dheera »

kalkin wrote: post #698

I think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis: The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence. And what are the possible outcomes? -…

> The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz.

Why wouldn't it? The value of the USD is decreasing, the value of the companies to the world stays the same => stock price in USD increases.

The real thing to analyze is "amount of VOO shares you need to buy a Chipotle meal / Uber ride / 1 month's rent in SF / etc."

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#722

Post by epolanski »

tns_admin wrote: post #474
shridharxp wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a junior dev there is this pressure to produce code, add features, and investigate bugs within unprecedented time period. I know whole code base is fking up but i will still add that feature or do a sloppy bug fix without digging deeper.

In my experience, AI really lowered the bar for bad code in the name of delivering faster. I have seen people write highly complex code where all the complexity was not necessary. Think: deep unnecessary branching, pointless error handling and retries which make no sense in our context, hand-coded parsing using regexps, haphazard data flow, functions which seem purely computational but slyly make API calls, pointless…

> In my experience, AI really lowered the bar for bad code in the name of delivering faster.

I would've believed that 6 months ago, but not now.

If you have a good codebase with proper rails, hygiene and architecture, AI will produce better code than most engineers out there.

People forget that 90% of the field has always been charlatans barely able to implement a fizz buzz or go much beyond trial and error googling.

I'll say even more. I'm in the 10%, and it's increasingly clear to me that AI writes in minutes code that's better than mine.

Even stellar and respected OSS engineers are nowadays leveraging AI and guiding it less and less everyday beyond giving indications of what kind of data structure they may want for a complex problem or the kind of architecture they are looking for.

In any case, I don't like this field anymore, I have no joy from it, way too much work, way too many changes a human can cope with both on product and technological level (not even counting AI and its tooling itself). The interesting parts of thinking an entire afternoon or week experimenting to get that design right disassembling the pros and cons are gone.

Even if you want to do that, it's just faster to launch 6/7 worktrees with the different ideas and judge the results. But you don't get as intimate with the problem and the amount of information is way more than you can process.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#723

Post by zomglings »

denkmoon wrote: post #615
solenoid0937 wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also at a FAANG here. Surprised you don't manage to use $300 in a whole day. It's almost trivial to productively use that much in under an hour. Leadership is not being dumb, at least on this topic. If your token usage is that low, you just aren't using AI that much (even if you think you are.)

I use $30 a day to produce a decent amount of code. Certainly more than we need - thinking about/designing the correct solution/distilling requirements is still the bottleneck. How can you possibly even review $300/day worth of output?

It doesn’t have to be $300/day worth of output tokens. It could be like $290/day worth of input tokens to teach both you and the model about the problem you are solving and then $10/day worth of output tokens.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#724

Post by ufish235 »

pigpop wrote: post #719
kalkin wrote: post #698

I think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis: The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence. And what are the possible outcomes? -…

Weird that you mention the stock market and then conclude that there are only two outcomes: bust or success. If anyone can learn anything from the stock market it's that boom and bust are cycles that oscillate around a trend and everything tends to revert toward longer term trajectories. So, yes everyone is caught up with and overhyping AI and yes there will be a bust after the boom at some indeterminate point but th…

Yes and my partners father has been calling for a bust for the last decade and everything has simply taken off.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#725

Post by virgil_disgr4ce »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #715
jpiasetz wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz Why wouldn’t it? The closure leads to price increases which leads to inflation which leads to non-dollar assets (ie stocks going up in value) Second from a US perspective the strait matters the least it has since world war 2. If the price stays high a bunch of fracking will come back online.

Because uncontrolled inflation will destroy your economy

yes, but that's future us's problem

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#726

Post by kalkin »

pigpop wrote: post #719
kalkin wrote: post #698

I think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis: The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence. And what are the possible outcomes? -…

Weird that you mention the stock market and then conclude that there are only two outcomes: bust or success. If anyone can learn anything from the stock market it's that boom and bust are cycles that oscillate around a trend and everything tends to revert toward longer term trajectories. So, yes everyone is caught up with and overhyping AI and yes there will be a bust after the boom at some indeterminate point but th…

I mean, there's a reason I started with a distancing phrase about a "reasonable argument"; I think what I'm suggesting is an interesting lens but does not capture the whole picture.

But also, even if bust is business as usual in the big picture and not a social disaster long term, it's of course not what individual investors want for their particular current investments.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#727

Post by kalkin »

jpiasetz wrote: post #710
kalkin wrote: post #698

I think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis: The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence. And what are the possible outcomes? -…

> The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz Why wouldn’t it? The closure leads to price increases which leads to inflation which leads to non-dollar assets (ie stocks going up in value) Second from a US perspective the strait matters the least it has since world war 2. If the price stays high a bunch of fracking will come back online.

> The closure leads to price increases which leads to inflation which leads to non-dollar assets (ie stocks going up in value)

I think this argument proves too much. Historically energy shocks have led to recessions, and in recessions the stock market usually doesn't go up. And the US economy is certainly exposed to global recession regardless of whether we're a net exporter of fossil fuels.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#728

Post by mancerayder »

wrxd wrote: post #538

I’m at a FAANG and we have $300/day token quota. Personally I don’t use that much of it but management is pushing really hard for it. “the quota has been raised for a reason, use it”. Any task: “have you tried working on it with Claude?”. Every meeting “now engineer x and y will show you what he did with AI”. It’s not all useless but most of the days I think I would be more productive if some processes were streamlin…

300 a day?? 7K dollars a month? No wonder they need to lay people off!

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#729

Post by mancerayder »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #591
wrxd wrote: post #538

I’m at a FAANG and we have $300/day token quota. Personally I don’t use that much of it but management is pushing really hard for it. “the quota has been raised for a reason, use it”. Any task: “have you tried working on it with Claude?”. Every meeting “now engineer x and y will show you what he did with AI”. It’s not all useless but most of the days I think I would be more productive if some processes were streamlin…

Also at a FAANG here. Surprised you don't manage to use $300 in a whole day. It's almost trivial to productively use that much in under an hour. Leadership is not being dumb, at least on this topic. If your token usage is that low, you just aren't using AI that much (even if you think you are.)

Wouldn't they save an enormous amount of money by getting rid of either you and the token quota, or a bunch of other people to continue paying your salary plus this insane quota?

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#730

Post by Miner49er »

kalkin wrote: post #698

I think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis: The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence. And what are the possible outcomes? -…

If we achieve runaway AI, the stock market goes to infinity. So from an expected value standpoint, massive spending on it is worthwhile. Even if the odds are tiny, the payoff warrants a massive bet size.
Post reply on HN