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The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

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Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#81

Post by dlevine »

I have been curious about this for a while, particularly in relation to the increasing cost of training LLMs.

I was recently talking to a friend who works on the AI team for one of the large tech companies, and I asked him this directly. He said that each generation is ~10x the training cost for ~1.5X improvement in performance (and the rate of improvement is tapering off). The current generation is ~$1 billion, and the next generation will be about $10 billion.

The question is whether anyone can afford to spend $100 billion on the next generation after that. Maybe a couple of the tech giants can afford that, but you do rapidly get to unaffordability for anyone smaller than the government of a rich country.

It will likely be possible to continue optimizing models for a while after that, and there is always the possibility of new technology that creates a discontinuity. I think the big question is whether AI is "good enough" by the time we hit the asymptote, where good enough is somewhat defined by the use case, but roughly corresponds to whether AI can either replace humans or improve human efficiency by an order of magnitude.

Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#82

Post by [deleted] »

dlevine wrote: post #81

I have been curious about this for a while, particularly in relation to the increasing cost of training LLMs. I was recently talking to a friend who works on the AI team for one of the large tech companies, and I asked him this directly. He said that each generation is ~10x the training cost for ~1.5X improvement in performance (and the rate of improvement is tapering off). The current generation is ~$1 billion, and…

[deleted]

Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#83

Post by Teknomancer »

EA-3167 wrote: post #78
dpflan wrote: post #8

It’s the best demo-able software today that lets the customers’ minds go wild with the possibilities. But then the nuances of human abilities in commercial settings, like call center, become realities and obstacles that the software can’t surmount. Costs rise, productivity not so much, and then legal gets involved and it’s even more costly.

Plus there's the reality that all of this mediocre capability requires VAST inputs of energy that are totally unsustainable. I've said it here before and will again, AI is just the pivot from crypto that props up NVIDIA prices and lets tech bros speculate on a market that simply will never materialize.

As somebody who recently used Claude Opus to help quickly and affordably solve complex problems in 3D design work (OpenSCAD) while designing a marketable product, I have my doubts about your analogy. Prior to the availability of affordable and accessible AI, I could have taken some Bitcoin and paid somebody smarter than me to help me with this work, but I guarantee it would have been less economically viable, both in terms of financial cost to me and in terms of energy consumption costs.

Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#84

Post by tim333 »

belter wrote: post #29
dpflan wrote: post #8

It’s the best demo-able software today that lets the customers’ minds go wild with the possibilities. But then the nuances of human abilities in commercial settings, like call center, become realities and obstacles that the software can’t surmount. Costs rise, productivity not so much, and then legal gets involved and it’s even more costly.

This is the best description of the current state of affairs. But who is going to risk not invest on what could be another possible major breakthrough in 3 to 5 years? Either from a GPT5 or another source? It's not like all the brainpower that left OpenAI recently, suddenly converted to farming... At least load on NVIDIA options....

It feels a bit like the 1999 dot com bubble. The internet was real but valuations got ahead of the reality.

Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#85

Post by Jensson »

Teknomancer wrote: post #83
EA-3167 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus there's the reality that all of this mediocre capability requires VAST inputs of energy that are totally unsustainable. I've said it here before and will again, AI is just the pivot from crypto that props up NVIDIA prices and lets tech bros speculate on a market that simply will never materialize.

As somebody who recently used Claude Opus to help quickly and affordably solve complex problems in 3D design work (OpenSCAD) while designing a marketable product, I have my doubts about your analogy. Prior to the availability of affordable and accessible AI, I could have taken some Bitcoin and paid somebody smarter than me to help me with this work, but I guarantee it would have been less economically viable, both in…

If you need it to do small standard tasks that normally requires an expert, then these AI can often solve them for you.

If however you need an expert to do a longer term project, then these AI can not solve them for you. It does replace some jobs as you say, but most people don't work on short term project consultation so overall it doesn't matter much.

> and in terms of energy consumption costs.

Did you include the cost of training the model? I'm pretty sure the total investments that goes into AI today way outspend the cost of such small consultation gigs that AI can replace currently. Customer support is the biggest moneymaker so far and even that is hard to do right with customers suing over lies from the AI bots.

Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#86

Post by senordevnyc »

EA-3167 wrote: post #78
dpflan wrote: post #8

It’s the best demo-able software today that lets the customers’ minds go wild with the possibilities. But then the nuances of human abilities in commercial settings, like call center, become realities and obstacles that the software can’t surmount. Costs rise, productivity not so much, and then legal gets involved and it’s even more costly.

Plus there's the reality that all of this mediocre capability requires VAST inputs of energy that are totally unsustainable. I've said it here before and will again, AI is just the pivot from crypto that props up NVIDIA prices and lets tech bros speculate on a market that simply will never materialize.

Wait until you hear how much energy a human worker consumes...

Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#88

Post by CuriouslyC »

EA-3167 wrote: post #78
dpflan wrote: post #8

It’s the best demo-able software today that lets the customers’ minds go wild with the possibilities. But then the nuances of human abilities in commercial settings, like call center, become realities and obstacles that the software can’t surmount. Costs rise, productivity not so much, and then legal gets involved and it’s even more costly.

Plus there's the reality that all of this mediocre capability requires VAST inputs of energy that are totally unsustainable. I've said it here before and will again, AI is just the pivot from crypto that props up NVIDIA prices and lets tech bros speculate on a market that simply will never materialize.

AI is legit, but you are right that currently it's too expensive and being propped up by investments paid for in compute from cloud providers. We're making rapid progress in bringing the compute requirements of high level models down though, and eventually we'll get over this need to make supermodels and start making distilled models for specific tasks, which will provide the benefits without the drawbacks of all knowing models.

Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#89

Post by CuriouslyC »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #79
magic_hamster wrote: post #55

This article deals with the ginormous models being trained and run in places like meta or openai - but the real AI revolution is a mix of things and we've only barely scraped the surface of what we could do with this technology. I say this not because the next ChatGPT will be incredible (which it might be) but because it's actually the open source community which amazes me with what has already been built, and runs l…

I think you're overestimating what the open source community has done. The core value of GenAI (the models) that is currently open sourced has ONLY been contributed by large companies. What the open source *community* has contributed is frontends and implementations of research papers. It is hugely important of course, and not to be ignored, but GenAI simply doesn't exist at all without large companies.

Not true, open source is also doing a lot of fine tunes/post training on Llama3, and there's OpenChat as well, so if Llama didn't exist we'd still have something to work with.

Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#90

Post by iLoveOncall »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #89
iLoveOncall wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're overestimating what the open source community has done. The core value of GenAI (the models) that is currently open sourced has ONLY been contributed by large companies. What the open source *community* has contributed is frontends and implementations of research papers. It is hugely important of course, and not to be ignored, but GenAI simply doesn't exist at all without large companies.

Not true, open source is also doing a lot of fine tunes/post training on Llama3, and there's OpenChat as well, so if Llama didn't exist we'd still have something to work with.

Both build on top of models made by large companies. Once again, LLMs don't exist without those.

And it's obvious given the cost involved in training such models.

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