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AI is slowing down

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721–730 of 820 posts

Re: AI is slowing down

#721
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He seems to think that the moment Nvidia release new hardware, all existing hardware becomes worthless. I am the OP and I totally agree with you on this one point. In fact the progress being made by open weights models strongly suggests that some of this hardware has much more of a life. The overarching point he makes about incomplete data centres is that the current offering is running successfully on that very in…

Future demand is unknowable. He might be directionally correct but wrong in magnitude, or right about everything, or wrong about everything. Unfortunately people who call bubbles never make their claims falsifiable or do anything else to build confidence, like take short positions. Zitron attacks the very notion that he might put skin in the game like that as obviously crazy. I don't know to what extent we can say th…

All of this is fair, but it's also important to weigh your criticisms of Zitron's claims against the absolutely unsupported claims being made by Altman on a regular basis. They never show their working in even the way he does.

FWIW on capacity constraints, my gut instinct is that like every other startup these AI companies are are really only now beginning to do the serious efficiency work, because they had money and resources to throw at scaling without it; never optimise too early is pretty much a startup mantra.

Re: AI is slowing down

#722
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gen AI is strictly bad for society.

Can't really agree. It's improved my life more than any other single innovation made in my lifetime.

The positives: Some tech nerds got a cool new toy

The negatives: Culture is destroyed, truth is destroyed, democracy is destroyed.

I guess its a wash at the end of the day.

Re: AI is slowing down

#723
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.

lol - the guy who thinks every single subscriber to a newsletter is a paying customer wants to be taken seriously. Zitron's POVs are always deeply researched, well-sourced and clearly formulated - things that, in and of themselves, are extremely valuable in today's world. Oh the AI bubble hasn't burst yet, so he's an idiot? Please tell me how you think the US stock market as a whole, following the Iran war, Trump's tariffs, etc. isn't just pure fraud at this point? The fact it hasn't collapsed /yet/ is not indicative of him being wrong, but rather that the 'economy' is absolutely detached from any real value whatsoever (something it historically had to be tied to, at least tangentially).

Re: AI is slowing down

#724
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.

Ask Alex Jones before he got sued for being wrong, or just any politician in general.

Re: AI is slowing down

#725

AI companies are racing to win the future of computing. They are possibly in a winner take all death race against each other. The stakes are so high that these cash rich companies cannot afford not to throw everything they have into this. The sunk costs are irrelevant when it’s a question of survival. Whether you hate or love AI computing is being completely reinvented - at the absolute core of this is computers prog…

> Anthropic is winning this race by a country mile right now.

How's that?

Re: AI is slowing down

#726
post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of HN's quirks, for better or worse, is that the lack of ability to downvote submissions encourages "controversial" content to rise to the top. On Reddit, if 500 people like a submission and 500 people dislike it, then it'll end up with 0 points and fail to reach /r/all But on HN, the same content will end up at 500 points since only the people who like it can affect its rank (unless it dies after getting mass fl…

People (ab)use the flagging system for that. I've seen plenty of categories of article that get upvoted onto the front page and then instantly vaporized off it by flagging.

I use a pushbullet channel for HN500. I get a notification whenever an HN submission hits 500 up votes.

It's not common, but every so often one of these submissions will be flagged by the time I get around to clicking the notification.

Re: AI is slowing down

#727
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shows that the author has a strong negative emotional reaction towards AI which likely influences his opinions and impartiality. He is preaching to the choir, if you already hate AI you will love the article, if you don't hate AI already you will find the article insufferable.

> He is preaching to the choir, if you already hate AI you will love the article, if you don't hate AI already you will find the article insufferable. I'm neither (or both, if you want - I can hate the direction its taking humanity while not hating my usage of it or opportunities it brings), and I definitely did not find his writing to be either lovable or insufferable. I enjoyed reading it in a "smells-like-BOFH-but…

It's fully in the BOFH/The Register tradition, yeah.

Some of his manner reminds me also of Max Keiser's "The Truth About Markets" which I credit with telling me about the subprime crisis a couple of years before it happened, even though people thought he was insane… because he kind of is.

Re: AI is slowing down

#728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it doesn't seem to me that we would be better off without cars altogether, despite all the related issues Oh my god, no. I also want the benefits of automobiles! They are strictly more capable than, say, trains. That's where I would derail the discussion completely when going into details, but no, I am not against cars as a technology. Apart from all the ethical and social arguments (logistics, ambulances, the elde…

The problem with grandiose statements like the GGP's are that they compare a realized outcome with an entirely idealized outcome they have in their brains as an alternative.

The thread is full of statements more grandiose and idealized than mine.

> Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing...

> we make everything else in the world worse in order to maximize the profit

> destroying the planet for data centers

Re: AI is slowing down

#729
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't immediately become worthless, but they don't last all that long either https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/datacenter-g...

This doesn't match my experience, in academia I saw ~40-45% utilization NVIDIA GPU clusters that went 6 years with <20% failure rate. Might be a TPU thing?

I'm FAR form an expert on this, but I believe that the operating costs such as power + cooling form a big part of the lifecycle. I have no doubt that at some point within the 6 years that are being booked, that replacing entire working racks won't be more cost efficient.

Re: AI is slowing down

#730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is obviously that engagement drives his revenue, and correctness or facts have nothing to do with it. Everyone knows that content creators will maximise engagement, and clearly he has found an audience who are seeking out a certain narrative, and will write to that narrative to generate revenue.

"clearly he has found an audience" What do you mean "clearly"? Do you know his engagement numbers? Or you just find the content engaging?

I haven't fact checked anything here, I took the $7 million at face value. If he is generating that amount of money from his content creation, then I think my statement makes sense, right?

I don't wacth/read his content at all because I find AI-doomers really boring and tiresome.

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