Number of active users on ChatGPT is at an all-time high. Number of tokens consumed on OpenRouter is at an all-time high. I'm not seeing the plateau.
AI is slowing down
741–750 of 820 posts
Re: AI is slowing down
#742Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
I don't think I am misinterpreting him. I did read some of his articles and did listened to some of his podcasts.
He is very very clear and open on what he thinks about usefulness of ai. He is not saying "it isn't as great as the hype". He is saying "it is useless". He is simply not the centrist kind of guy when it comes to AI usefulness.
Re: AI is slowing down
#743Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like how he's started preliminarily saying "Now listen, I don't make any trades on this fine thinking. And that's okay by me." So far below the standards of public markets due diligence. Sadly credulous readers will follow his advice. Which could turn out to be accurate in the public markets -- who knows? But if it's accurate it will be an accident, because the quality of analysis is so poor we should not call it a…
Not sure what you're getting at here. Would you be happier if he was trading on the arguments he's making, introducing an incentive to lie?
Yes, vastly. It’s not hard to do it ethically: “I’m short. Here’s why.”
Re: AI is slowing down
#744Lots 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.
The issue he highlights is purely number driven here.
His predictions timing sucks but he’s right in pointing out the insane numbers involved.
I think AI is a wonderful tool but I also think that there are many wonderful tools that if we bet our entire economy on would result in a catastrophe.
Re: AI is slowing down
#745The gulf between reality and this tech-illiterate grifter continues to widen. I strongly suspect his shtick will fall apart before this year is over. And I hope at least some have been keeping close track of what he's been saying.
Re: AI is slowing down
#746Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it really a grift when everyone knows? Its not like they are keeping their financials secret. Heck, the main AI companies aren't even public yet, so its largely sophisticated investors getting "grifted". Normally a grift involves tricking someone. The AI situation seems more like a bunch of investors knowingly investing in something very speculative. If they lose their money, while that is the nature of speculativ…
What’s the line that separates grift from speculative investment? Does it only require true believers? If Elizabeth Holmes truly believed in her product, would that have made it not a grift? > The AI situation seems more like a bunch of investors knowingly investing in something very speculative. If they lose their money, while that is the nature of speculative investments. This is a bit reductive, especially as the…
> What’s the line that separates grift from speculative investment?
Are they actively lying to people in concrete ways? Not just, we think this is going to be big, when that is questionable, but do they say AI can do X right now, when objectively it cannot even remotely do X under any circumstance? Lying is what makes the difference.
> well, maybe there isn’t a word that elegantly describes that situation, but “grift” is as close as I can muster.
I think the word you are looking for is capitalism.
Rich people put their money where they think it will generate more money. The economy uses that to determine what to focus on. Sometimes rich people are wrong and are punished by losing a bunch of money. That is how the system is supposed to work. It is far from perfect but traditionally has done better than the alternatives.
Re: AI is slowing down
#747Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a very hard experiment to run. You have a population that’s already “treated”. You can’t blind them to the fact that they’re using AI tools. It’s hard to imagine a study that wouldn’t have serious flaws that people would then use to dismiss and form their own conclusions. Sure you have METR but that was very low n with a very old model. I think the surest sign of productivity gains is the sheer volume of adoptio…
Sheer volume of adoption is fairly forced though - "use it or you're fired, and tokenmaxx the hell out of it". Most the people I know outside of tech don't seem to be particularly captured by it, if they use it at all.
Yes since frontier perf is too expensive. Consider though frontier perf costs roughly 40x less per year. So you see super adoption for mega costs by the companies with the scale and budget for it, and then folks who can’t afford it that have to wait until maybe fall until they have the game changing perf we saw for opus 4.5 that spurred the enormous adoption by the major players.
I agree that there are incentives to waste tokens but this is strategic: they spend now for people to build and explore, then they keep the things that work and drop the things that don’t.
Re: AI is slowing down
#748Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Culture is destroyed, truth is destroyed, democracy is destroyed.
Just because those things happened in Dune doesn't mean they'll come true. It should be obvious what massive potential the thinking machines have for humanity as a whole.
Re: AI is slowing down
#749Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do think Ed in intentionally ignorant of the capabilities of LLMs. But I also don't know that I would classify LLMs as 'wildly useful' for coding. Most productivity gains seem to be hallucinated, and while it's too early to make any claims on long term outcomes, there are plenty of studies indicating they might be even more negative. There are definitely use cases for LLMs in coding. And at times , they can be wild…
The studies you are talking about are probably outdated, it's difficult to deny the actual productivity boost of coding agents. I'm not talking about the quantity of code produced, but about actual user needs that are now resolved that would not have been before. The main productivity gain will not come from existing software engineer, but from people that couldn't code at all before but are now able to do things by…
> The studies you are talking about are probably outdated, it's difficult to deny the actual productivity boost of coding agents.
Is it? Can you produce any evidence for such a productivity boost?
Re: AI is slowing down
#750> The AI Companies Are Going To Start Getting Desperate
This is the part that concerns me the most, AI companies will start bidding on increasingly contentious contracts out of desperation. In practice, this means building services that facilitate killing to anyone they're not legally prevented from doing business with... and even then, they may be able to do business with them still through intermediaries.