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I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

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Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#851

Post by 0x3f »

827a wrote: post #846
kalkin wrote: post #698

I think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis: The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence. And what are the possible outcomes? -…

I don't know. We invented machines that can answer arbitrary questions and are quickly demonstrating the ability to answer questions no human has been able to answer. We're sending more rockets to space in a week than we have in the prior decade. My car can drive itself. We experienced a global pandemic and within six months engineered and scaled the mass production of a vaccine to mitigate it. We also just invented…

> quickly demonstrating the ability to answer questions no human has been able to answer.

Such as?

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#852

Post by jpiasetz »

kalkin wrote: post #727
jpiasetz wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz Why wouldn’t it? The closure leads to price increases which leads to inflation which leads to non-dollar assets (ie stocks going up in value) Second from a US perspective the strait matters the least it has since world war 2. If the price stays high a bunch of fracking will come back online.

> The closure leads to price increases which leads to inflation which leads to non-dollar assets (ie stocks going up in value) I think this argument proves too much. Historically energy shocks have led to recessions, and in recessions the stock market usually doesn't go up. And the US economy is certainly exposed to global recession regardless of whether we're a net exporter of fossil fuels.

The shock is smaller, and oil’s importance is less so less likely to cause a recession. In the 70 price went up 400% and oil was rough 1.5x more important. Today price up 100% so the past oil shock was 6x larger

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#853

Post by ericbarrett »

victoro wrote: post #827
wnmurphy wrote: post #801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My car drives itself. That's a $18T global market. Also $1T in data center investment makes sense when you realize that companies are racing to create virtual white collar workers. Google spends $9B a year on software engineers.

> Google spends $9B a year on software engineers. Well they are projected to spend $175 - $185B on capex in this year alone most of it for AI buildout. Lets say only 150B of that is for AI. If they can then somehow replace all their software engineers with AI that they then run for free and depreciate over 10 years then they just replaced 9B a year software expense with 15B a year depreciation expense for the next de…

> depreciate over 10 years

I believe the One Big Beautiful Bill Act allows full depreciation in the first year: https://www.bassets.net/blog/obbba-depreciation-2025-2026-gu...

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#854

Post by delecti »

mancerayder wrote: post #728
wrxd wrote: post #538

I’m at a FAANG and we have $300/day token quota. Personally I don’t use that much of it but management is pushing really hard for it. “the quota has been raised for a reason, use it”. Any task: “have you tried working on it with Claude?”. Every meeting “now engineer x and y will show you what he did with AI”. It’s not all useless but most of the days I think I would be more productive if some processes were streamlin…

300 a day?? 7K dollars a month? No wonder they need to lay people off!

Well, presumably (hopefully) they aren't expected to work weekends.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#855

Post by [deleted] »

impulser_ wrote: post #48

I'm pretty sure he's talking about companies and people outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI and not really about using AI itself. I don't think using AI to write code is AI psychosis or bad at all, but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis. You see this a lot with financial people and VC on twitter. They literally post screenshots of ChatGPT as their thinki…

[deleted]

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#856

Post by code_biologist »

ufish235 wrote: post #724
pigpop wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird that you mention the stock market and then conclude that there are only two outcomes: bust or success. If anyone can learn anything from the stock market it's that boom and bust are cycles that oscillate around a trend and everything tends to revert toward longer term trajectories. So, yes everyone is caught up with and overhyping AI and yes there will be a bust after the boom at some indeterminate point but th…

Yes and my partners father has been calling for a bust for the last decade and everything has simply taken off.

As a bear that's been very confused by markets failing to exhibit mean reversion in 2019 and 2022, and now with the Hormuz energy crisis, I've thought a lot about this. There's a lot of new things happening. Fed/QE intervention that has never stopped, just been more well disguised. Fiscal/government spend intervention. I think Mike Green's work on the rise of passive investing is really good, in particular explaining how it prevents mean reversion in absence of changing net cash flows into passive instruments. Passive will also induce or worsen the bust if net cash ever starts to flow out passive. Green's youtube interviews are great.

All to say, your SO's dad would have been right at any point prior to the current financial cycle. Knowing what's changed doesn't make forecasting easier though.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#857

Post by stalfosknight »

dtnewman wrote: post #44

If you feel this way, you might like my new CLI tool, Burn, Baby, Burn (those tokens) ( https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn/tree/main ). Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287

This is delicious.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#858

Post by alluro2 »

nine_k wrote: post #826
PieTime wrote: post #813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market for who? Who is left working? If we can’t answer that question then we’re not prepared for what’s next.

Driving a car is a chore, not a job (usually), much like washing dishes is. Dishwashers did not produce an economic collapse. OTOH replacing people with AI would indeed bring about a huge economic downturn. What would be good is augmenting humans so that they can do 10x more. That would enable things that are hard to imagine exactly now, much like computers enabled interesting transformations in the society from 1980…

And do you feel that the industry in general, and individual companies are currently trying to augment / 10x their workers and have everyone share in the 10x profits that will bring? Or are they jumping on opportunity to try and cut costs by even single digits, by replacing those workers with AI and it's not their problem what those people do from there?

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#859

Post by jmalicki »

mitchellh wrote: post #76
impulser_ wrote: post #48

I'm pretty sure he's talking about companies and people outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI and not really about using AI itself. I don't think using AI to write code is AI psychosis or bad at all, but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis. You see this a lot with financial people and VC on twitter. They literally post screenshots of ChatGPT as their thinki…

Correct. I use AI a ton and I'm having more fun every day than I ever did before thanks to it (on average, highs are higher, lows are lower). Your characterization is all very accurate. Thank you. Here's some other topics I've written on it: - https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey - https://mitchellh.com/writing/building-block-economy - https://mitchellh.com/writing/simdutf-no-libcxx (complex change th…

The worst part of AI is that the time to produce software has become entirely unpredictable. "If Claude is randomly good at this, and happens to be up today, it will take me about 3 hours. If Claude is randomly bad at this task, or has downtime, 2 weeks"

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#860

Post by dahinds »

ericbarrett wrote: post #853
victoro wrote: post #827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google spends $9B a year on software engineers. Well they are projected to spend $175 - $185B on capex in this year alone most of it for AI buildout. Lets say only 150B of that is for AI. If they can then somehow replace all their software engineers with AI that they then run for free and depreciate over 10 years then they just replaced 9B a year software expense with 15B a year depreciation expense for the next de…

> depreciate over 10 years I believe the One Big Beautiful Bill Act allows full depreciation in the first year: https://www.bassets.net/blog/obbba-depreciation-2025-2026-gu...

That's a bookkeeping issue, it doesn't affect the argument at all (which is that the capex has a finite useful life over which it would need to pay for itself).
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