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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#731

Post by dofm »

1attice wrote: post #708
Kiro wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely damages the argument. Not sure why you think your question is a gotcha.

Think back. Has there ever been a time when you were both correct and angry? Would an angry Pythagoras' theorem be wrong, simply by virtue of his anger?

He was a bit bonkers anyway. But maybe:

The square of the hypotenuse — you multiply it by its bleedin' self — is LITERALLY equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Again. Multiply each of the other sides BY THEMSELVES, and then add them together. It's that bleedin' simple Jim Cramer could do it. That number is the same as the square of the hypotenuse, no matter what idiot CEOs think.

Re: AI is slowing down

#732

Post by daveguy »

watwut wrote: post #714
daveguy wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

He is saying technology isnt significant. Again and again and he puts a lot of emphasis on it. He is also focusing the circular financing deals, on it being a bubble etc. Obviously, you can agree with one thing and not with other. And he can be right in one thing and not the other. But, if you listen to what he is saying, he is absolutely saying the technology is not significant.

I think you're misinterpreting a strongly worded "it isn't as great as the hype" with "there's nothing there". Because "nothing there that matches the hype" is both 100% true and completely different than "nothing there".

Re: AI is slowing down

#733

Post by indianmouse »

piokoch wrote: post #574
jollyllama wrote: post #220

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…

#3 Trillion, or even more, will be achievable. We are at the very beginning of the monetization of AI. It all started with the free Chat GPT, and a few others. Now the standard is $20 a month if you are not using AI tools too much and you don't need anything fancier. Otherwise you need to pay more, like $200 a month. Unless you are not company and you don't have some "enterprise deal". And you need an enterprise deal…

Extremely sorry for this unrelated rant. Got triggered by the keyword "Modi".

Quoting Modi is a joke which one cannot even remotely relate w.r.t to AI and don't even feel sorry for saying that since that man blabbers on every stage about non-sensical / non-existent stuff! Watching his videos is the best timepass one can have!

Having said that, the infra and mindset is definitely not there in India to even remotely to innovate or compete in AI race!

Academia is a huge BS where every other person is a backstabber!

A lot of talent is there for sure, but all wants to work for some company or another since there is absolutely zero support for entrepreneurs . No real innovation.

All copy cats as they have proven with mobile and robotics. Just copying or masking Chinese products with the local brand names and reselling. That's all they are good at and that's the irony.

So far, nothing has come from that country which is a real innovation or ground breaking. The day it happens probably one can consider that they are good.

But otherwise, they are good at selling / reselling and scamming the world and nothing else! They cannot produce anything or whatever they produce is taken control by a handful of big corporates from the western region. That's a narcistic corporate monopoly!

Extremely bad tax structure, endless corruption and useless and unqualified ministers occupying worst portfolios, people are really struggling to survive!

Where will they innovate or compete in the global AI race?

Everyone at every level just want to scam and make money to surive that's all!

Period.

Re: AI is slowing down

#734

Post by aspenmartin »

jazzcomputer wrote: post #382
aspenmartin wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cite a real source for that last bit, I don’t think that is true. Also the budgets should be cut the spend at some places goes beyond any reasonable amount. The strategy there is to hook everything in and find the right processes, then cut the rest. Things then get better and better with each model release. The way you make a viable service that eats 300bn annually is to have enough demand to service that. Anthropic…

When you say "Things then get better and better with each model release." How far behind are models that can be run locally, and do you expect that this will be widespread?

https://epoch.ai/data-insights/consumer-gpu-model-gap

I think over the years local models have fairly consistently been ~7 months behind frontier performance. Local models are hugely important but I don’t see the calculus changing. I can imagine it’s certainly the case for many tasks that there will be diminishing gains for performance improvements or reliability pass some threshold, in which case you don’t need frontier performance and you can certainly use local models or at least cheaper tiers of proprietary models if local is too much of a hassle. Plus of course use cases where local is necessary or the pros of having local models or on device models outweighs that of frontier.

Maybe things will change though, I would assume through basically government subsidies from China etc, to undercut existing frontier labs, but you can always spend more (better data more compute etc) for better performance and that I can imagine will always have a selling point.

Re: AI is slowing down

#735

Post by madaxe_again »

pjc50 wrote: post #668
madaxe_again wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh but it is. The debt that’s funding the AI buildout ends up in the oddest of places - like pension funds. If defaults occur and work their way up the chain, it’s not dissimilar to the subprime affair - and at that point it’s bail out the poor pensioners or get crucified at the ballot box. There’s lots of precedent for this over the past decades, both in the U.S. and over the pond.

How much of this is debt as opposed to equity, though? Can we have a balance sheet?

Not readily, as the private companies are private, and the public ones obfuscate their books - and even then the question that remains is how much of that equity is funded by debt.

Re: AI is slowing down

#736

Post by techblueberry »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #720
techblueberry wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, one is, it probably does depend on workflow. Some folks probably are doing things that can be accelerated by AI, and I think if you’re a small team with a good product head and know what you’re doing then AI probably helps a lot. But what if the problem you’re trying to solve is the altogether too often problem of like getting teams that are dependent on you to upgrade the library they use. And what if the librar…

All good questions. I am not a big believer in claiming I know whether we are in a financial bubble or not. I just put it all in VT and we will see what happens. I know that the AI allows me to write code I couldn’t write before much more quickly than before but I admit that this may not help with organizational friction. Although if this theory is true — that AI helps with coding but coding is not the friction point…

Yeah, again the answer is definitely not no AI. And I’ve seen the - you know - I can one shot whole applications that would have taken me weeks or months before. But it’s also much easier to one shot apps that aren’t in the critical path. I’m building all sorts of tools to make my job easier, but I still have to do the job.

I’m a platform engineer. The primary failure mode for platform engineers is building tools people don’t want. AI doesn’t really make that easier. Or it can but it can also make it harder by making it easier to chase down ideas that you don’t get traction on. And I think that - net balanced across the organization is probably why productivity gains get sort of averaged out.

For sure I think solo devs who have a system are seeing gains, as long as you can I think have the discipline to have a process that includes feedback and learning and your not just feeding off of dopamine hits of one shotting features but yeah. I mean for solo devs the code was never really the limiting factor, it was product-market fit and marketing.

So solo devs who have a system may be laughing themselves all the way to the bank, but we may not see a lot of net new solo devs.

But if code is cheap now then it’s sort of inherently devalued. 2 8 person startups can probably relatively easily find a dev with AI experience to rocket ship their code generation, which means the basic skills of talking to customers, change management, and building the right thing become even more valuable.

Even solo devs I wonder - almost every post-mortem of a failed company goes “I wish we had spent more time talking to customers and less time writing code”

Again if you can get the discipline right, maybe as a solo devs you can get more work done faster and spend more time with your family. That’s incredibly valuable!

But if you go and add a big new feature, or a second product - unless your community is primed for constant growth(no man’s sky is one community where more more more seems good) you’re just growing the surface area where all the other skills are more necessary.

Re: AI is slowing down

#737

Post by abc123abc123 »

overgard wrote: post #506
zymhan wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were not asking for your individual opinion. They were asking why any given person would need it.

It turns out I am any given person

Yep... I've met him and I can confirm that he is in fact, any given person. To that, I might add that I'm in the same situation. AI is a convenience and light entertainment, and as such, I'm willing and ready to pay exactly 0 USD for it privately and in my business. If the price rises beyond this point, they for sure have to move it from convenience to essential and so far, I have not seen any shadow of essential.

Re: AI is slowing down

#738

Post by j4102_ »

mattcasmith wrote: post #659
pjc50 wrote: 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?

I've been thinking about this too. The quality maintenance of large systems isn't something you can just completely automate away with AI. Even if the code is written with AI, you still have to read through and verify it.

Even though that is still faster than regularly writing code, I end up losing that nuanced knowledge that I get from going through documentation and writing it out by hand - actually doing the work. I just don't see it actually replacing developers unless managers are willing to produce MORE code with the SAME level of quality.

Re: AI is slowing down

#739

Post by jollyllama »

avarun wrote: post #578
jollyllama wrote: post #220

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.

Ok, so how many jobs does AI have to take (replacing existing or filling new "jobs") to pay off, then?

Re: AI is slowing down

#740

Post by techblueberry »

barrell wrote: post #628
Aerolfos wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do think Ed in intentionally ignorant of the capabilities of LLMs. I think it's more complicated than that too. He's pretty well versed in the stated capabilities of LLMs. The fact that he isn't a deeply involved technical developer who knows the ins and outs and nuances of using LLM tools is the point , because the stated capabilities of LLMs are that they are trivial to use, extremely powerful, and getting so m…

I don’t get me wrong, I’m on Ed’s side and get where he’s coming from. I just think his arguments are normally taken to the extreme, making them less defensible, when he could make the same arguments from a more moderate stance and ultimately be more convincing. His arguments, albeit valid, can often sound like reductos ad absurdums the way he presents them.

Part of the problem is the like - sociomedia factor. Ed’s figured out how to break through the noise. I’m not surprised that Ed Zitron is the kind of counterpoint you get in the Musk-Trump attention economy / CEO’s that sound more like prophets than business executives world.
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