Surprising to simultaneously announce the end of the road yet point to the road ahead
This is one thing I don't get. Why will LLMs still exist if AI companies go bust? Will we have stagnant models that can't be improved anymore as a service? Isn't each query still a monumental computing task that they lose money on?
The salaries, training and especially data center build out might be a little crazy right now.
But the post-bankruptcy railroads that were kept were able to operate without the burden of the construction costs, because that had been destroyed in the bankruptcy (along with the original owners).
So, AI: I suspect that the training costs (plus hardware costs) dominate the operating costs. If that is so, then a post-bankruptcy AI company could still be a profitable business. It wouldn't be able to grow its hardware very fast, or be able to re-train new models very often, but it could still be an ongoing business. The current owners would still get nothing, though.
It can write my code a bit less shitty tomorrow, but that doesn't sound like the fulfillment of the promises given.
Tomorrow, another company will yet again fail to integrate agentic workflows.
Even with current abilities if they're just rolled out it's still trillions of the economy.
A bit like OK Waymo isn't perfect but it works in SF...we don't need a giant breakthrough to bring it to another 1000 cities.
Everyone is focused on how to make the models better (rightly), but impact and economic viability is in implementation and there is a lot of low hanging fruit there.
>another company will yet again fail to integrate agentic workflows.
'tis true
Well, a lot of cities have snow, or different flora and fauna, or different road rules (Karachi, Mexico City). Maybe the same approach works (spend hellacious amounts of money to train) but again, for what economic benefit?
Obviously, it would be very useful, but still limited by it's context and prompt. For many tasks, coding models are getting close. It will do everything I ask generally correctly the first time. Around half the re-dos are because I under-specified the prompt. Soon that will be 100% of re-dos, and the programming aspect of my job will be mostly focused on writing good prompts, yet I will still be here identifying and translating real-world requirements into prompts.
We are quickly approaching a situation where LLMs can ace all benchmarks, and yet still not see the insane ROI that the frontier labs are predicting because humans are a bottleneck, and so is experiment.
For example that perfect LLM may be able to find the cure to cancer, but all the research in the world isn't enough information to answer that question, so we need to conduct experiments and learn more. Maybe that can speed up humanity's cancer discoveries by 10X, but not 1000X, purely because of the experiment bottleneck.
> ...every time there's been a technology wave that leads to wealth creation, especially fast wealth creation, that will inherently invite speculators, carpetbaggers, interlopers that want to come take advantage of it. Think of the gold rush, you know, and so people want to make it a debate. Do you believe in AI or is it a bubble? And if you say you think it's a bubble, they say, "Oh, you don't believe in AI." Like this gotcha kind of thing. And if you study Perez, and I I think this is absolutely correct. If the wave is real, then you're going to have bubble-like behavior. like they come together as a pair precisely because anytime there's very quick wealth creation, you're going to get a lot of people that want to come try and take advantage of that.
Seems about right to me. https://youtu.be/D0230eZsRFw
The arguments here are totally bonkers. People didn't wonder what airplanes were for, or cars, or computers, or vaccines. They had immediate, obvious benefits and uses, but still none of them experienced this speed of investment. This is something else entirely.
There was some puzzlement as to what computers were for. See:
>Thomas J. Watson, the chairman of IBM in 1943, who purportedly said, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers
Also the speed of investment isn't unprecedented - the railway boom was much larger as a percent of gdp.
I'm not saying the tech isn't impressive. I'm impressed! Cursor bugbot has found some pretty gnarly bugs in my code, blessedly. But it's neither reliable nor economically viable, even if you don't think they owe anyone anything for training on their data (I do think they owe us).
says Google. There was a big crash after, wiping out investors. Time will tell with this one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44805979
This AI investment is interesting because it's mostly not in durable goods, unlike the railroad's rails and (most importantly) land. The buildings and power infrastructure for the datacenters could retain value for decades, but the servers won't unless something goes badly wrong. I believe this is the largest investment in human history justified primarily by the anticipated value of intellectual property.
chvid•1mo ago
ta9000•1mo ago
tim333•1mo ago
Also check out ten years into the future https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/pages/90099333.html https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/item.html?id=90099333 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632