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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#801

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

JacobAsmuth wrote: post #526
vb-8448 wrote: post #96

Zitron is in the business of content creation and not successful predictions . It doesn't matter how many times he (and several others around) will say the end is here , they have to be right only once. BTW, one thing for sure he is right about are the economics, as of today there is no way these massive investments are gone be paid.

Now that you mention it, has Ed ever made a single testable prediction that came true?

That prices would increase for the frontier models, and that usage limits would go down.

Re: AI is slowing down

#802

Post by oblio »

simianwords wrote: post #800
oblio wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bet 50€ that big AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI) have bad regarding their core financials. Excluding one time deals such as renting hardware, external cash infusions, the core AI model business (training models and selling inference) is unprofitable and will be be at the expected scales (50 billion € or more) for the next 5 years at least. I bet that within 5 years they will be sold for scrap to bigger com…

This is not fair, lets just speak about Inference margins. You are bringing 100 other things to make it more ambgigous. Statement: margins API prices of all models are greater than 10% in Anthropic. Feel free to either agree to what I'm saying or bet otherwise.

1. You can't have a model without training. Training is part of the cost. A model trained 5 years ago is borderline useless. Also models cannot be retrained continuously, we do not have the technology (even if we had it, it would just increase the ongoing operational cost).

2. Rephrasing your statement:

  At June 2026 prices, profit margins for all Anthropic models are >10%.
That claim is super defensive. Serving a model can only be done if the model has been built and trained, can't have it any other way. Building it and training it costs lots of money.

Even so, fine, I'll take that bet. Anthropic inference prices are still marginally subsdizided. Once they're public they will hike their API prices several times over the next 24 months. Even that might not save them, because when we take all their expenses into account, they will probably need to raise prices 2-3x compared to their June 2026 prices.

Re: AI is slowing down

#803

Post by lenkite »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #516
overgard wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except inference has been getting more expensive, not less

Inference has been going down in price on a cost/intelligence basis. If you don't need the smartest model, there are plenty of good Chinese models that are dirt cheap.

Aren't these Chinese models also heavily subsidized at the moment ? They are running off govt money which also has a cut-off date by 2028-30.

Re: AI is slowing down

#804

Post by FromTheFirstIn »

red75prime wrote: post #268
asveikau wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where I heard this, but I'm reminded of a story about someone predicting the dotcom crash early, circa 1998. For 2 years they were demonstrably crazy, and missed out on massive stock market gains. Then they were right. (And yes, tech slowly bounced back after that.) Predicting the timing of such a thing is notoriously difficult. I don't think being wrong about timing 2 years ago means there won't be a correc…

> Predicting the timing of such a thing is notoriously difficult. So, it stands to reason that it wasn't a prediction, but a lucky guess (unless the alleged predictor has a history of correct predictions).

That actually doesn’t stand to reason at all!

Re: AI is slowing down

#805

Post by chipsrafferty »

Laurel1234 wrote: post #749
Spixel_ wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We previously had a backlog of 2 years of features planned. Now we have no work and are just working on tech debt and planning to get more involved in the product side because they need help getting the developers work to do.

Re: AI is slowing down

#806

Post by chipsrafferty »

latexr wrote: post #571
reasonableklout wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Almost every programmer I know personally has a pretty measured opinion on where these things are useful and where they're not. The breathless hype seems mostly from non coders. We have polar opposite media bubbles. I see OG programmers all over my timeline either grieving the "end of software engineering" (a la Ryan Dahl) or extolling "automatic programming" (a la antirez).

> We have polar opposite media bubbles. I see OG programmers all over my timeline The person you’re replying to, in the bit you quoted, said specifically: > Almost every programmer I know personally People you know personally are not a “media bubble”. They are, to borrow your expression, polar opposites. It’s people you can speak with candidly and trust versus bits of text without the full context.

I disagree, people you know are much more likely to have the same exact opinions as you on most things. It's the definition of a bubble.

Re: AI is slowing down

#807

Post by gbalduzzi »

pbmonster wrote: post #580
gbalduzzi wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't small local models worse efficiency-wise? It means that every person must have a powerful enough machine to power a small model, and we are very, very far away from that. The best solution, from an efficiency point of view, is to use smaller models on datacenters, requiring much less of them.

There's an efficiency sweet spot where hardware that people have anyway gets a higher percentage of load. MacBooks have a lot of memory and a lot of FLOPs. They mostly sit unused all day. Yes, the excess energy use will be higher than a GPU in a datacenter doing the same work, but you have to generate an absurd amount of tokens before the dollar-efficiency catches up with the MacBook.

You need to have a 3k dollar machine available though, I think you are overestimating how many people have access to it

Re: AI is slowing down

#808

Post by brokenmachine »

dgellow wrote: post #663
jorisw wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to at least refer to some sources why?

That has been covered to death since months, there is no good solution to cooling without an atmosphere. But even going into the technical details is a waste of time, think about how complicated maintaining such a system in space would be compared to having it on earth, the whole idea is a complete grift from beginning to end. There is literally no benefit to do it in space other than as a marketing tool. Nobody who…

What a surprise that something this implausible could come from the same guy who proposed trains that run in vacuum tubes.

I can't believe the people who actually listen to this guy can tie their own shoelaces. And somehow he became the richest person on earth. Humans are irredeemable.

Re: AI is slowing down

#809

Post by brokenmachine »

anthonypasq wrote: post #758
hungryhobbit wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think whether "LLMs are actually changing the State of the Art" or not matters for anything he wrote. If the AI companies need $X billion in revenue to stay afloat, it doesn't matter if 0.5% or 5% or 50% of that revenue is from transforming the State of the Art. It's 100% irrelevant: what matters is that, transformation or no, these companies won't have the income to pay their bills. And if they can't pay the…

maybe its insane to think this, but if all AI providers turned off free plans tomorrow i think they would easily have enough people willing to pay $20 a month for it to sustain all their spending. everyone is still fighting for market share so they are giving stuff away, but that doesnt mean people wouldnt be willing to pay for it if it wasnt free.

I wouldn't.
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