[HN Gopher] AI's $600B Question
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AI's $600B Question
Author : fh973
Score : 105 points
Date : 2024-07-03 19:55 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sequoiacap.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sequoiacap.com)
| jfghi wrote:
| Reminds me of the gnomes from South Park.
| threeseed wrote:
| > Founders and company builders will continue to build in AI--and
| they will be more likely to succeed, because they will benefit
| both from lower costs and from learnings accrued during this
| period of experimentation
|
| Highly debatable.
|
| When we look back during the internet and mobile waves it is
| overwhelmingly the companies that came in after the hype cycle
| had died that have been enduring.
| malfist wrote:
| Let's see: Microsoft Windows: wasn't close to the first OS
|
| Microsoft Office: wasn't close to the first office editing
| suite
|
| Google: Wasn't close to the first search engine
|
| Facebook: Wasn't close to the first social media website
|
| Apple: ~~First "smart phone"~~ but not the first personal
| computer. Comments reminded me that it wasn't the first
| smartphone
|
| Netflix: Wasn't close to the first video rental service.
|
| Amazon: Wasn't close to the first web store
|
| None of the big five were first in their dominate categories.
| They were first to offer some gimmick (i.e., google was fast,
| netflix was by mail, no late fees), but not first
| categorically.
|
| Though they certainly did benefit from learnings of those that
| came before them.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Apple: First "smart phone" but not the first personal
| computer
|
| Was it the first smartphone? I would call phones like the
| Palm Treo and later BlackBerries smartphones. There were even
| apps, but everything was lot more locked down and a lot more
| expensive.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| First modern smartphone (capacitive touch screen/multi-
| touch/form factor), but not first smartphone.
| dvt wrote:
| > There were even apps, but everything was lot more locked
| down and a lot more expensive.
|
| And just plain... _bad_. The entire experience didn 't have
| that "feel" that Apple turned into reality. It's comparable
| to today's AI landscape--the technology is pretty neat, but
| using it is a complete slog.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I actually have pretty fond memories of PalmOS PDAs. The
| hardware was very nice, but they were held back by the
| resistive touchscreen and dependence on a stylus for
| input. I never used a Treo but it felt like this was Palm
| trying to copy BlackBerry by adding a physical keyboard.
|
| Edit: There were also the limitations of that era that
| held devices back in general. WAP internet[1] was awful,
| but most mobile services were too slow for much else.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Pr
| otocol
| nextos wrote:
| Nokias were very open. You had a terminal with apt-get.
|
| The entire device was a regular Linux machine.
| endless1234 wrote:
| In general, they were not. You're probably thinking of
| the very niche and unsuccessful Maemo/MeeGo project - eg
| Nokia N900 - that were indeed Linux-based. But everything
| else smartphone-ish from Nokia before Lumia (Windows
| Phone) were Symbian, which predates Linux and has nothing
| to do with it.
| irq wrote:
| > I would call phones like the Palm Treo and later
| BlackBerries smartphones.
|
| It's not just you; at the time these products were
| available, _everyone_ called them smartphones.
| Emphatically, Apple did not bring the first smartphone to
| market, not even close. They were, however, the first to
| popularize it beyond the field of nerds into the general
| public.
| nextos wrote:
| There were Nokias running Maemo ahead of the iPhone. Note
| these were not Symbian.
|
| The 770 was released in Q4 '05.
|
| They definitely fell within the smartphone category, but
| oddly the first few iterations lacked GSM radio.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I would classify them as tablets. At least what I thought
| my N810 as.
| malfist wrote:
| I'm a complete idiot. I almost bought an HTC fuse too
| robbiemitchell wrote:
| > some gimmick
|
| "key differentiator" and not necessarily easy to pull off or
| pay for
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| "Pioneers get the arrows, and settlers get the land"?
| malshe wrote:
| There is an old study that supports your point. The abstract
| reads:
|
| "Several studies have shown that pioneers have long-lived
| market share advantages and are likely to be market leaders in
| their product categories. However, that research has potential
| limitations: the reliance on a few established databases, the
| exclusion of nonsurvivors, and the use of single-informant
| self-reports for data collection. The authors of this study use
| an alternate method, historical analysis, to avoid these
| limitations. Approximately 500 brands in 50 product categories
| are analyzed. The results show that almost half of market
| pioneers fail and their mean market share is much lower than
| that found in other studies. Also, early market leaders have
| much greater long-term success and enter an average of 13 years
| after pioneers."
|
| PDF available here:
|
| https://people.duke.edu/~moorman/Marketing-Strategy-Seminar-...
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| > I expect this will lead to a final surge in demand for NVDA
| chips
|
| But other than FOMO why would someone buy better chips when they
| don't actually know what to do with their old ones?
| alecco wrote:
| H100s are in very high demand and usually running work 24/7. So
| much that the energy cost is a big factor. The B100 halves the
| energy costs, among many other things.
| technotony wrote:
| If they are in such high demand, then are they just being
| priced below cost? why else is the capex so much higher than
| the revenues? These things must depreciate over only 3-5
| years (or less?)
| neaanopri wrote:
| This seems about as bearish as a VC is allowed to be. My takeaway
| is:
|
| Sell! Sell! Sell now before it's too late!
| beejiu wrote:
| It interests me that the $200-600 billion number seems to be all-
| derived from GPUs. Are LLMs/AIs totally dependent on GPUs? I read
| last week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40787349) that
| there is research ongoing to run LLMs on FPGAs at greater energy
| efficiency.
|
| I'm reminded of Bitcoin/crpyto, which in its early history was
| all operated on GPUs. And, then, almost overnight, the whole
| thing was run on ASICs.
|
| Is there an intrinsic reason something similar couldn't happen
| with LLMs? If so, the idea of a bubble seems even more
| concerning.
| cma wrote:
| Nvidia and AMD bought out the big FPGA makers.
| jamessinghal wrote:
| AMD bought Xilinx, but Intel recently spun off Altera.
| sason wrote:
| There is a fairly new ASIC named "Sohu" that is purpose-built
| for transformers. They have some bold claims that are
| impressive if true.
|
| I found a short discussion[2] you may find useful.
|
| [1]: https://www.etched.com/
|
| [2]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qhpB9NjcCHjdNDsMG/new-
| fast-t...
| wmf wrote:
| These numbers are just the hole from GPUs that have already
| been bought/ordered. Today's GPUs will inevitably be replaced
| by something, whether it be better GPUs, NPUs/TPUs, ASICs, or
| FPGAs. As chips get cheaper in the future the hole will grow at
| a slower rate but it only grows.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Is there an intrinsic reason something similar couldn't happen
| with LLMs?
|
| Only if we can increase the efficiency of LLMs by 2-3 orders of
| magnitude, there are only some in lab examples of this and
| nothing really being publicly shown.
|
| Even then the models are still going to require rather large
| amounts of memory, and any performance increases that could
| boost model efficiency would very likely increase performance
| on GPU hardware to the point we could get continuous learning
| models from multimodal input like video data and other sensors.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| There is a reason why we don't use ASICs and instead use GPUs.
|
| While people may say something is a Transformer that's more of
| a general description. It's not a specific algorithm; there are
| countless transformers and people are making progress on
| finding new ones.
|
| Bitcoin runs a specific algorithm that never changes. That's
| for an ASIC. AI/ML runs a large class of models. GPUs are
| already finely tuned for his case.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Others are saying this article is bearish, but then...
|
| > A huge amount of economic value is going to be created by AI.
| Company builders focused on delivering value to end users will be
| rewarded handsomely.
|
| Such strong speculative predictions about the future, with no
| evidence. How can anyone be so certain about this? Do they have
| some kind of crystal ball? Later in the article they even admit
| that this is another one of tech's all-too-familiar "Speculative
| frenzies."
|
| The whole AI thing just continues to baffle me. It's like
| everyone is in the same trance and simply assuming and chanting
| over and over that This Will Change Everything, just like
| previous technology hype cycles were surely going to Change
| Everything. I mean, we're seeing huge companies' entire product
| strategies changing overnight because We Must All Believe.
|
| How can anyone speak definitively about what AI will do at this
| stage of the cycle?
| glitchc wrote:
| Whenever I hear the AI hype cycle, I'm always reminded of
| expert systems and how they were going to revolutionize the
| world.
| awahab92 wrote:
| there were probably people who doubted electricity, vaccines
| and indoor plumbing.
| ryandrake wrote:
| There were also people who doubted the Segway, Magic Leap,
| Theranos, 3D TVs, Windows Phone, and Google Glass.
|
| I think doubt is OK, at least it is before any particular
| technology or product has actually proven itself.
| fragmede wrote:
| the gap between participants in this conversation is that
| some have had it proven itself for themselves and others
| around them, and others have not seen that same proof.
| glitchc wrote:
| This is false equivalence and you know better. Electricity
| is foundational technology. What we call AI are LLMs, which
| are great and useful, but not in the same league as
| something foundational like electricity.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Now, the question of "Are LLMs intelligent" is debatable,
| but intelligence is foundational itself.
| rurp wrote:
| The ration of hyped technologies that turned out to be
| overhyped, versus ones that turned out to be as impactful
| as electricity is... I don't even know how many orders of
| magnitude different, but it's a lot.
| llm_trw wrote:
| You should also be reminded about the internet. After the
| dotcom bubble it was extremely common to hear it outright
| dismissed as never being useful for anything.
|
| Sometimes the future just gets here before we're ready for
| it.
| glitchc wrote:
| Repeat after me: An LLM is not AI. The internet enabled a
| whole new world of possible applications. It's unlikely
| this or even the next upgrade to ML will get there. If we
| get to AGI, sure, that's grpund-breaking, but we're still a
| few steps removed from that.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Repeat after me: "AI hype" is not like Bitcoin hype, it's
| like Dot-com boom.
|
| Generative models are _already_ changing how people live
| and work. Ignore the grifters, and ignore the
| entrepreneurs. Look at civilians, regular folks, and
| watch how it impacts them.
| glitchc wrote:
| Oh the belief is so strong! Wouldn't it be great if this
| were true.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's not hard to have strong beliefs about something
| that's real.
| llm_trw wrote:
| >Repeat after me: An LLM is not AI.
|
| They are more intelligent than the average person I deal
| with on a daily basis.
|
| The one thing us meat bags have going for us is that we
| have bodies and can do things.
| pixl97 wrote:
| And with the advances in robotics recently, who knows how
| long we're going to hold on to this monopoly.
| apitman wrote:
| > An LLM is not AI
|
| Good luck with that genie
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| This really is different, and I say that as someone who spent
| a lot of time on expert systems, not as someone who is overly
| bought into AI hype.
|
| The problem with expert systems is that even if the tooling
| was perfect the people using them needed a rather nuanced and
| sophisticated understanding of ontologies. That just wasn't
| going to happen. There is not enough of that kind of
| expertise to go around. Efforts to train people largely
| failed. I think the intentional undermining of developer
| salaries pushed a lot of smart people out of the software
| industry making the problem even worse.
|
| That's what makes AI special, the ability to deliver value
| even when used by unsophisticated operators. Many workflows
| can largely stay the same and AI can be sprinkled in where it
| makes the most sense. I use it for documentation writing and
| UI asset production and it's better in that role than the
| people I used to pay.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Such strong speculative predictions about the future, with no
| evidence. How can anyone be so certain about this?
|
| The evidence is all around you. For anyone who has made any
| serious attempt to add AI to your current life and work
| process, you will fairly quickly notice that your productivity
| has doubled.
|
| Now, do I as a random software engineer who is now producing
| higher quality code, twice as fast, know how to personally
| capture that value with a company? No. But the value is out
| there, for someone to capture.
|
| > It's like everyone is in the same trance and simply assuming
| and repeating over and over that This Will Change Everything
|
| It already is changing everything, in multiple fields. Go look
| up what happened to the online art commission market. It got
| obliterated over a year ago and is replaced by people getting
| images from midjourney/ect.
|
| Furthermore, if you are a software engineer and you haven't
| included tools like github copilot, or cursor AI into your
| workflow yet, I simply don't consider you to be a serious
| engineer anymore. You've fallen behind.
|
| And these facts are almost immediately obvious to anyone who
| has been paying attention in the startup space, at least.
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| Ive added "how have you incorperated generative AI into your
| workflow" as an interview question, and I dont know if it is
| stigma or actual low adoption, but I have not had a single
| enthusiastic response across 10+ interviews for senior
| engineer positions.
|
| Meanwhile, I have chatGPT open in background and go from
| unaware to informed for every new keyword I hear around me
| all day everyday. Not to mention annotating code, generating
| utlity functions, and tracing errors
| ilaksh wrote:
| Would you consider hiring on a contract basis? I use AI
| tools like Copilot in vim, and have my own agent framework
| to ask questions or even edit files for me directly, which
| I have been trying to use more. And I could use a new
| contract. You can see my email in my HN profile.
| devjab wrote:
| I think if sort of depends on the work you do. If you're
| working on a single language and have been for a while then
| I imagine that much of the value LLMs might give you
| already live in your existing automation workflows.
|
| I personally like co-pilot but I work across several
| languages and code bases where I seriously can't remember
| how to do basic stuff. In those cases the automatic code
| generation from co-pilot speeds my efficiency, but it still
| can't do anything actually useful aside from making me more
| productive.
|
| I fully expect the tools to become "necessary" in making
| sure things like JSdoc and other domination is auto-updated
| when programmers alter something. Hell, if they become good
| enough at maintaining tests that would be amazing. So far
| there hasn't been much improvement over the year we've used
| the tools though. Productivity isn't even up across teams
| because too many developers put too much trust into what
| the LLMs tell them, which means we have far more cleanup to
| do than we did in the previous couple of years. I think we
| will handle this thing once we get our change management
| good enough at teaching people that LLMs aren't necessarily
| more trustworthy than SO answers.
| choeger wrote:
| > Furthermore, if you are a software engineer and you haven't
| included tools like github copilot, or cursor AI into your
| workflow yet, I simply don't consider you to be a serious
| engineer anymore. You've fallen behind.
|
| That sounds like you're fresh out of college. Copilot is
| great at scaffolding but doesn't do shit for bug fixing,
| design, or maintenance. How much scaffolding do you think a
| senior engineer does per week?
| volkk wrote:
| depends on what you're working on. i'm a senior engineer
| currently doing a lot of scaffolding for startups and my
| copilot saves me a ton of time. life's good.
| mdale wrote:
| It's getting better and new UIs for it are being tested
| like Claude and artifacts.
|
| Sr. Eng adopted copilot and sung it's praises a lot faster
| then the jr engineers. Especially when working on codebases
| with less familiar languages.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I started teaching myself programming 40 years ago and I
| believe that Copilot and other AI programming tools are now
| an essential part of programming. I have my own agent
| framework which I am using to help complete some tasks
| automatically.
|
| Maybe take a look at tools like aider-chat with Claude 3.5
| Sonnet. Or just have a discussion with gpt-4o about any
| programming area that you aren't particularly familiar with
| already.
|
| Unless you literally decided you learned everything you
| need and don't try to solve new types of problems or use
| new (to you) platforms ever..
| stale2002 wrote:
| Nope. 10 years experience working at startups and FAANG.
|
| And yes cursor AI/copilot helps with bugs as well.
|
| It works because when you have a bug/error message, instead
| of spending a bunch of time on Google/searching on stack
| overflow for the exact right answer, you can now do this:
|
| "Hey AI. Here is my error message and stack trace. What
| part of the code could be causing it, and how should I fix
| it".
|
| Even for debugging this is a massive speed up.
|
| You can also ask the AI to just evaluate your code. Or
| explain it when you are trying to understand a new code
| base. Or lint it or format it. Or you can ask how it can be
| simplified or refactored or improved.
|
| And every hour that you save not having to track down crazy
| bugs that might just be immediately solvable, is an hour
| that you can spend doing something else.
|
| And that is without even getting into agents. I haven't
| figured out yet how to effectively use those yet, and even
| that is making me nervous/worried that I am missing some
| huge possible gains.
|
| But sure, I'll agree that of all you are doing is making
| scaffolding, that is a fairly simply usecase.
| delichon wrote:
| 40+ years of coding here. I've been using LLMs all day and
| getting a large boost from it. That last thing I did was
| figure out how to change our web server to have more worker
| processes. It took a half dozen questions to cure a lot of
| ignorance and drill down the right answer. It would have
| taken a lot longer with just a search engine. If you're not
| seeing the large economic advantage of these systems you're
| not using them like I am.
| skydhash wrote:
| > _If you 're not seeing the large economic advantage of
| these systems you're not using them like I am_
|
| I just read the manual.
| fragmede wrote:
| do you flip to the back of the book to the index to find
| the pages that references a topic, or do you use ctrl-f?
| beambot wrote:
| Very true! From where I sit, most of the hype cycles were
| overestimated in the short term & underestimated in the long
| term: world wide web, mobile, big data, autonomous cars, AI,
| quantum, biotech, fintech, clean tech, space and even crypto.
| rty32 wrote:
| Twice as fast is way over exaggerating the reality. In
| certain cases, sure, but more generally you are looking at
| 10%-50% productivity increase, more likely on the lower end.
| I say this as someone who has access to ChatGPT and AI code
| completion tools and use them every day, and the numbers are
| backed up by Google's study. https://research.google/blog/ai-
| in-software-engineering-at-g...
| americanvirtual wrote:
| Yeah some expert I work in the field type YouTubers I
| remember well over 7 months ago now kept saying that we're
| going to have AGI within 7 months. He was like the big
| prediction hinging practically his whole channel on... Sorry
| I don't have the name but there's a little anecdote.
| simonw wrote:
| If, like me, you're using LLMs on a daily basis and getting
| real personal value out of them, it's hard not to conclude that
| they're going to have a big impact.
|
| I don't need a crystal ball for this. The impact is already
| evident for us early-adopters, it's just not evenly distributed
| yet.
|
| That's not to say they're not OVER hyped - changing the entire
| company roadmap doesn't feel like a sensible path to me for
| most companies.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Early Adopters are always True Believers. That's why they are
| early adopters. Every single one of them is going to say "The
| impact is clear! Look around you! I use XYZ _every day!_ "
| You really don't know what the adoption curve will look like
| until you get into the Late Majority.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| We're _already_ entering Late Majority stage. Early
| Majority is like a good chunk of the western population,
| which already should tell you something - the "technology
| adoption model" might not make much sense when the total
| addressable market is _literally everyone on the planet_ ,
| and the tech spreads itself organically with zero marketing
| effort.
|
| And/or, it's neither hard nor shameful to be True
| Believers, if what you believe in is plain fact.
| llm_trw wrote:
| >Early Adopters are always True Believers.
|
| Early adopters were using gpt-2 and telling us it was
| amazing.
|
| I used it and it was completely shit and put me off openai
| for a good four years.
|
| gpt-3 was nearly not shit, and 3.5 the same just a bit
| faster.
|
| It wasn't until gpt-4 came out that I noticed that this AI
| thing should now be called AI because it was doing things
| that I didn't think I'd see in decades.
| simonw wrote:
| I tried GPT-2 and thought it was interesting but not very
| useful yet.
|
| I started using GPT-3 via the playground UI for things
| like writing regular expressions. That's when this stuff
| began to get useful.
|
| I've been using GPT-4 on an almost daily basis since it
| came out.
| llm_trw wrote:
| The hype around gpt2 was ridiculous. It made me firmly
| put openai into 'grifters, idiots and probably both'
| territory.
|
| Turns out they were just grifters as the hilarious mess
| around Sam Altmans coup/counter coup/coup showed us.
| Fripplebubby wrote:
| I don't know what your operating definition of "grifter"
| is but for me, a grifter is not a company that delivers a
| product which gains a large adoption and mindshare
| (ChatGPT) and essentially sets the world on fire. (not an
| opinion on Altman specifically but OpenAI at large)
| wruza wrote:
| I'm not that much of a believer, but what is clear is that
| "AI" still has a plug incompatible with your regular wall
| socket, if you get the analogy. It's too early to draw a
| circle around adopters count.
|
| We'll talk counts when my grandma will be able to hey siri
| / okay google something like local hospital appointment or
| search for radish prices around her. It already is
| possible, just not integrated enough.
|
| Coincidentally, I'm working on a tool at my job (unrelated
| to AI) that enables computer device automation on much
| higher level than playwright/etc. These two things combined
| will do miracles, for models good enough to use it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| How can anyone _not_ see just how impactful it 's going to be?
| Or already is? I can't think of a single recent technology that
| was so widely adopted by tech and non-tech people alike,
| immediately integrated into day-to-day experience. The rise of
| mobile phones and e-commerce in the 90s would be the last time
| I've seen this happen (I'm not counting smartphones, as those
| are more of an iteration). Or social media, in purely software
| space.
|
| I've just had GPT-4o write me a full-featured 2048 clone in ~6
| hours of casual chat, in between of work, making dinner, and
| playing with kids; it cost me some $4 in OpenAI bills, and I
| didn't write a single line of code. I see non-tech people
| around me using ChatGPT for anything from comparison shopping
| to recipe adjustments. One person recently said to me that
| their dietitian is afraid for their career prospects because
| ChatGPT is _already_ doing this job better than she is. This is
| a small fraction of cases in my family &friends circle; anyone
| who hasn't lived under the rock, or wasn't blinded by the
| memetic equivalent of looking at a nuclear weapon detonation,
| likely has a lot of similar things to say. And all of that is
| not _will_ , it's _is, right now_.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > How can anyone not see just how impactful it's going to be?
| Or already is? I can't think of a single recent technology
| that was so widely adopted by tech and non-tech people alike,
| immediately integrated into day-to-day experience. The rise
| of mobile phones and e-commerce in the 90s would be the last
| time I've seen this happen (I'm not counting smartphones, as
| those are more of an iteration). Or social media, in purely
| software space.
|
| You can't _know_ this for certain until you look back on it
| in retrospect. We did not _know_ mobile phones and e-commerce
| were going to be huge back in the 90s. We know now, of
| course, looking back, and the ones who guessed right back
| then can pat themselves on the back now.
|
| Everyone is guessing. I'll admit it's totally possible LLMs
| and AI are going to be as earth shattering as its boosters
| claim it will be, but nobody can know this now with as much
| certainty as is being written.
| LorenzoBloedow wrote:
| I personally attribute this FOMO to so called AI
| influencers who love "shilling" AGI as something that's as
| true as 1 + 1 = 2
| llm_trw wrote:
| I don't get why people insist this is agi any more than a
| ship is artificial general swimming.
|
| It doesn't matter if it's general, what matters is that
| its useful. And if you don't find it useful just remember
| a lot of people in the 00s didn't find google useful
| either since they already had the yellow pages.
|
| I strongly suggest paying for a subscription to either
| openai or anthropic and learning quickly.
| fragmede wrote:
| You don't even have to do that, just go to
| http://ChatGPT.com and type at it. you don't even need to
| make an account.
| llm_trw wrote:
| You get what you pay for, despite what everyone is saying
| the 4o gpt model is really bad for long form reasoning.
|
| Buy the subscription and use the turbo4 model.
|
| After that api credits so you get access to the
| playground and change the system prompt. It makes a huge
| difference if you don't want to chat for 10 minutes
| before you get the result you want.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _You can 't know this for certain until you look back on
| it in retrospect._
|
| Correct, but the thing is, AI blown up much faster than
| phones - pretty much a decade in a single year, in
| comparison. Mobile phones weren't _that_ useful early on,
| outside of niche cases. Generative AI is already spreading
| to every facet of peoples ' lives, and has even greater
| bottom-up adoption among regular people, than top-down
| adoption in business.
| mrbungie wrote:
| Any evidence backing up these claims about adoption?
|
| I thought the same about adoption (across multiple
| audiences, not just tech workers and/or young people),
| was faced with surprising poor knowledge about GenAI when
| making surveys about it in my company. Maybe investors
| are asking the same questions right now.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| IIRC openai was the fastest growing service by
| subscriptions of all time.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Pew Research asked Americans this March:
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2024/03/26/americans...
|
| 23% said they'd used ChatGPT, 43% said they hadn't, 34%
| didn't know what it was.
| fragmede wrote:
| the article states
|
| > The Information recently reported that OpenAI's revenue
| is now $3.4B, up from $1.6B in late 2023.
|
| and links to
|
| https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openais-
| annualized-r...
|
| That's a _lot_ of $20 /month subscriptions. it's not all
| that but that's a lot of money, regardless.
| threeseed wrote:
| OpenAI's revenue is not exclusively subscriptions.
|
| There are a lot of companies building private GPTs and
| using their API.
| Quothling wrote:
| > Correct, but the thing is, AI blown up much faster than
| phones
|
| What do you base that on though? Two years into the
| iPhone, Apple reported a $6.75b revenue on iPhone related
| sales. ChatGPT may reach or surpass that this year
| considering they're currently at $3.4b. That's not
| exactly what I would call growing faster than phones,
| however, and according to this article, very few people
| outside of nvidia and OpenAI are actually making big
| money on LLM's.
|
| I do think it's silly to see this wave of AI to be
| referred to as the next blockchain, but I also think you
| may be hyping it a little beyond its current value. It
| being a fun and useful tool for a lot of things isn't
| necessarily the same thing at it being something that's
| actually worth the money investors are hoping it will be.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _What do you base that on though?_
|
| My childhood? I was a teen when mobile phones started to
| become widely used, and soon after pretty much necessary,
| in my part of the world. But, to reiterate:
|
| > _Two years into the iPhone, Apple reported a $6.75b
| revenue on iPhone related sales._
|
| That's just an iteration, and not what I'm talking about.
| Smartphones were just different mobile phones. I'm
| talking about the adoption of a mobile phone as a
| personal device by general population.
|
| > _It being a fun and useful tool for a lot of things isn
| 't necessarily the same thing at it being something
| that's actually worth the money investors are hoping it
| will be._
|
| That's probably something which needs to be disentangled
| in these conversations. I personally _don 't care what
| investors think and do_. AI may be hype for the VCs. It's
| not hype for regular Janes and Joes, who either already
| integrated ChatGPT into their daily lives, or see their
| friends doing so.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Its a lot easier to use AI when its basically given away
| for free than when it cost $399 for a Palm Pilot in the
| 90s.
|
| For a $399 device, Palm Pilot did well and had an
| excellent reputation for the time. Phones really took
| over the PDA market as a personal pocket-computer more-so
| than being used as ... a phone...
|
| Really, I consider the modern smartphone a successor to
| the humble PDA. I grew up in that time too, and I
| remember the early Palm adopters having to explain why
| PDAs (and later Blackberries) were useful. That was
| already all figured out by the time iPhone took over.
| threeseed wrote:
| This is all just meaningless anecdotes.
|
| And regular Janes and Joes are not using ChatGPT.
| Revenues would be 10-100x if that were the case.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _And regular Janes and Joes are not using ChatGPT.
| Revenues would be 10-100x if that were the case._
|
| 3/4 of the people I know are actively using it are on
| free tier. And based on all the HN conversations in the
| last year, plenty of HNers commenting here are _also_
| using free tier. I 'd never go back to GPT-3.5, but
| apparently most people find it useful enough to the point
| they're reluctant to pay that $20/month.
|
| As for the rest, OpenAI is apparently the fastest-growing
| service _of all time ever_ , so that says something.
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm one of the free tier people.
|
| A while back I used 3.5 to make a chat web page so I
| could get the better models as PAYG rather than
| subscription... and then OpenAI made it mostly pointless
| because they gave sufficient 4o access to the free tier
| to meet my needs.
| Avshalom wrote:
| >>apparently most people find it useful enough to the
| point they're reluctant to pay that $20/month.
|
| Or they find it useless enough that they're unwilling to
| pay for the upgrade.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Any talk of "regular people" inside the HN bubble is
| fraught with bias. Commenters here will sometimes tell
| you that "regular people" work at FAANG, make $400K/yr
| and have vacation homes in Tahoe. Actual "regular people"
| use Facebook occasionally, shop at the grocery store,
| watch Sportsball on TV, and plan their kids' birthday
| parties or their next vacation. They're not sitting there
| augmenting their daily lives with ChatGPT.
|
| You're a long time HN contributor and I admit when I see
| your username, I stop and read the comment because it's
| always insightful, polite, and often makes me think about
| things in ways I never have before! But this discussion
| borders on religious fervor. "Every facet of peoples'
| lives?" Come on, man!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Actual "regular people" use Facebook occasionally,
| shop at the grocery store, watch Sportsball on TV, and
| plan their kids' birthday parties or their next vacation.
| They're not sitting there augmenting their daily lives
| with ChatGPT._
|
| I'm aware of the HN bias, but in this case, I'm talking
| regular, non-tech, sportsball or TikTok watching crowd.
| Just within my closest circles, one person is using
| ChatGPT for recipes, and they're proficient at cooking so
| I was surprised when they told me the results are almost
| always good enough, even with dietary restrictions in
| place (such as modifying recipes without exceeding
| nutrient limits). Another person used it for comparison
| shopping of kids entertainment supplies. Another actually
| posted a car sale ad and used gen-AI to swap out
| background to something representative (no comment on
| ethics of that). Another is evaluating it for use in
| their medical practice.
|
| (And I'm excluding a hundred random uses I have for it,
| like e.g. making colorbooks for my kids when they have
| very specific requests, like "dancing air conditioners"
| or whatever.)
| doe_eyes wrote:
| > We did not know mobile phones and e-commerce were going
| to be huge back in the 90s.
|
| Eh? We did. The whole dot-com boom was predicated on that
| assumption. And it wasn't _wrong_. But most of the dot-com
| investments went sideways. In fact, they imploded hard
| enough to cause a recession.
|
| In the same vein, even if we all agree that AI is
| fundamentally transformative, it doesn't mean that it's
| wise to invest money into it right now. It's possible that
| most or all of these early products and companies will go
| bust.
| anon-3988 wrote:
| That's his point, we _know_ this. People can already use
| OpenAI as a replacement for Google search and people are
| already doing this. You might not think this is a good
| thing yadda yadda go to the library, but we already know
| that chat bots are here to stay.
| staunton wrote:
| There is a huge spectrum between "here to stay" and
| "changing everything". On another note, I think if the
| people arguing here would work out quantitative
| predictions, they would find that a not insignificant
| part of the "disagreement" about how big we should expect
| this to really be is in the framing.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| > I'll admit it's totally possible LLMs and AI are going to
| be as earth shattering
|
| You don't need earth shattering though. The PC revolution
| was huge because every company got a bit more productive
| with things like word processors and printing and email.
|
| The internet (and then later mobile) was big because every
| company got a revenue boost, from a small one with online
| presence to a a huge one for e-commerce to transformative
| with Netflix and streaming services.
|
| Ignoring the more sci-fi claims of AGI or anything, if you
| just believe that AI is going to make every office worker
| 10% more productive, surely each company is goign to have
| to invest in AI, no? Anytime you have an industry that can
| appeal to _every_ other company, it 's going to be big.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if in large companies (say >500
| office workers) 10% of all office works becomes
| redundant. Not in the form of each worker getting 10%
| more productive, but in form of some roles getting
| eliminated completely and others losing 80% of their
| workload.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| > You can't know this for certain
|
| Except AI is _already_ being used by people (like myself)
| every day as part of their usual work flow - and it 's a
| huge boost in productivity.
|
| It's not IF it will make an impact - it IS currently making
| an impact. We're only just moving past early adopters and
| we're still in the early stages in terms of tooling.
|
| I'm not saying that AI will become sentient and take over
| humanity, but to think that AI isn't making an impact is to
| really have your head in the sand at this point.
| maxlamb wrote:
| What's a 2048 clone?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| http://jacek.zlydach.pl/v/2048/
| woodruffw wrote:
| This version seems to be using slightly different rules:
| my recollection is that the original 2048 prevented a
| move if it wouldn't cause any blocks to shift or
| collapse, while this one spawns a block unconditionally.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It doesn't anymore.
|
| You're right. I pasted your comment to aider and it fixed
| it on the spot :).
|
| EDIT: see https://git.sr.ht/~temporal/aider-2048/commit/9
| e24c20fc7145c....
|
| A bit lazy approach, but also quite obvious. Pretty much
| what you'd get from a junior dev.
|
| (Also if you're wondering about "// end of function ..."
| comments, I asked the AI to add those at some point, to
| serve as anchors, as the diffs generated by GPT-4o
| started becoming ambiguous and would add code in wrong
| places.)
| woodruffw wrote:
| I think it's also not progressing the block size with
| score: IIRC the original came also begins spawning 8s and
| 16s once you get above your first 512 block. But I could
| be misremembering.
|
| (This kind of feedback driven generation is one of the
| things I _do_ find very impressive about LLMs. But it 's
| currently more or less the only thing.)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I don't remember it doing progressive block sizing - I
| only vaguely remember being mildly annoyed by getting to
| 2048 taking >2x the effort it took to get to 1024, which
| itself took >2x the effort of getting to 512, etc. - a
| frustration which my version accurately replicates :).
| saulpw wrote:
| I canceled my GPT-4 subscription recently because it just
| wasn't that impactful for me. I found myself using it less
| and less, especially for things that matter (because I can't
| trust the results). The things it's good at: boilerplate
| text, lightweight trivia, some remixing/brainstorming. Oh and
| "write me a clone". Yes, it can write clones of things,
| because it's already seen them. I've spent WAY more time
| trying to get anything useful out of it for a non-clone
| project, than it took me when I just buckled down and did it.
|
| Yes, "many things are clones", but that just speaks to how
| uncreative we are all being. A 2048 clone, seriously? It was
| a mildly interesting game for about 3 minutes in 2014, and it
| only took the original author a weekend to build in the first
| place. Like how was that impactful that you were able to make
| another one yourself for $4?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Like how was that impactful that you were able to make
| another one yourself for $4?_
|
| It's been my "concentration ritual", an equivalent of
| doodling, for a few years in 2010s, so I have a soft spot
| for it. Tried getting back to it the other day, all my
| usual web and Android versions went through full
| enshittification. So that $4 and couple hours bought me a
| 2048 version that's lightweight, works on my phone, and
| doesn't surveil or monetize me. Scratched my own itch.
|
| Of course, that's on top of gaining a lot of experience
| using aider-chat, by setting myself a goal of making a
| small, feature-complete app in a language I'm only
| moderately good at (and environment - the modern web -
| which I both hate and suck at), with extra constraint of
| not being allowed to write even a single line of code
| myself. I.e. a thing too boring for me to do, but easy
| enough to evaluate.
|
| And no, the clone aspect wasn't really that important in
| this project. I could've asked it for something unique, and
| I expect it to work more-less the same way. In fact, this
| is what I'm trying _right now_ , as I just added persistent
| state to the 2048 game (to work around Firefox Mobile
| aggressively unloading tabs you're not looking at,
| incidentally making PWAs mostly unusable) and I have my
| perfect distraction completely done.
|
| EDIT:
|
| BTW. did I ever tell you about the best voice assistant
| ever made, which is Home Assistant's voice assistant
| integrated with GPT-4o? I have a near-Star Trek experience
| at my home right now, being able to operate climate control
| and creature comforts by talking completely casually to my
| watch.
| raspasov wrote:
| (Also a Chat GPT4o,x etc user)
|
| Try asking it something actually technologically hard or
| novel and see what answers you get.
|
| In my experience, it repeatedly bails out with "this is
| hard and requires a lot of careful planning" regardless
| of how much I try to "convince" the model to live the
| life of a distributed systems engineering expert. Sure,
| it spits out some sample/toy code... that often
| doesn't/compile or has obvious flaws in it.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| One difference between AI and mobile is this.
|
| The mobile revolution needs three kinds of investment:
|
| (A) The carrier has to build out a network
|
| (B) You need to buy a handset
|
| (C) Businesses need to invest in a mobile app.
|
| The returns that anybody gets from investing in A, B or C
| depend on the investments that other people have made. For
| instance, why should I buy a handset if the network and the
| apps aren't there? Why should a business develop an app if
| the network and users aren't there? These concerns suppress
| the growth of mobile phones in the early phase.
|
| ChatCPT depends on the existing network and existing clients
| for delivery so ChatGPT can make 100% of the investment
| required to bring their product to market which means they
| can avoid the two decades of waiting for the network and
| handsets to be there in order to motivate (C).
|
| ---
|
| Note another thing that younger people might never have
| noticed was that the US was far behind the rest of the world
| in mobile adoption from maybe 1990 to 2005. When I changed
| apartments in the US in the 1990s I could get landline
| service turned on almost immediately by picking up the phone.
| When I was in Germany later I had no idea I could go into a
| store in most countries other than the US and walk out with a
| "handy" and be talking right away so I ended up waiting a
| month for DT to hook up my phone line.
| meiraleal wrote:
| > I've just had GPT-4o write me a full-featured 2048 clone in
| ~6 hours of casual chat
|
| Honestly I'm totally in the AI camp but 6 hours to make a
| 2048 clone?! And that's a good result? Come on.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Of casual chatting in between making dinner, doing chores,
| playing with kids, and work. The actual time spent strictly
| on this was more like 2 hours. And that's with me writing
| zero lines of code, and using the technology stack (modern
| web) I hate and suck at (but I'm proficient enough to read
| the basics).
|
| Also, to be honest, it would've been much faster if GPT-4o
| didn't occasionally get confused by the braces, forcing me
| to figure out ways to coerce it into adding code in the
| right place. This is to say, there's still plenty of low-
| hanging fruits for improvement here.
| fragmede wrote:
| you come on. it's not six hours of focused work, it sounds
| like six hours while watching Netflix and puttering around.
| lend000 wrote:
| GPT-4 is an upgrade over a search engine (on the 2010
| internet, which was much easier to search than the internet
| today) and there is certainly opportunity in using it to
| chain together complex programming tasks fully
| programmatically, but we are stuck right on the cliff of a
| truly reliable and generalizable AI, and it isn't clear that
| we can just train an AI with the next generation of GPU's and
| more data and bridge that gap. Most of the truly high value
| add activities (fully autonomous programs and AGI that
| creates novel inventions) rely on a model more intelligent
| and more consistent than the current state of the art. So I
| think most of the valuation is in speculative potential.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I think it's reasonably obvious that the tech could have a
| lot of potential, but that's yet to be realised. Chatbot
| interfaces are so primitive and clearly not the final form
| for LLMs, but people have to invent that.
|
| But, tech being impactful doesn't mean it will create and
| deliver value for others.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Can you come up with an example of tech that was impactful
| without delivering value to others?
|
| The closest I can think of would be the atom bomb, but even
| that arguably brought significant value in terms of
| relative geopolitical stability.
| cfeduke wrote:
| Okay I guess I've just had a different experience entirely.
| Maybe I'm jaded by hallucinations.
|
| The code ChatGPT generates is often bad in ways that are hard
| to detect. If you are not an experienced software engineer,
| the defects could be impossible to detect, until you/ChatGPT
| has gone and exposed all your customers to bad actors, or
| crash at runtime, or do something terribly incorrect.
|
| As far as other thought work goes, I am not consulting
| ChatGPT over, say, a dietician or a doctor. The hallucination
| risk is too high. Producing _an_ answer is the not the same
| as producing a _correct_ answer.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| My experience actually agrees with you. It's just that the
| set of use cases that either:
|
| - Are hard (or boring) to do, but easy to evaluate - for
| me, e.g. writing code, OCR, ideation; or
|
| - Don't require a perfectly correct answer, but more of a
| starting point or map of the problem space; or
|
| - Are very subjective, or creative, with there being no
| single correct answer,
|
| is surprisingly large. It covers pretty much everything,
| but not everything for everyone at the same time.
| sumedh wrote:
| > The code ChatGPT generates is often bad in ways that are
| hard to detect.
|
| Does it work though, yes it does. There are many human
| coders who write bad code and life goes.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Okay I guess I 've just had a different experience
| entirely._
|
| I've seen both the good and the bad. I _really_ like the
| good parts. Most recently, Claude Sonnet 3.5 fixed a math
| error in my code (I prompted it to check for it from a
| well-written bug report, and it did it fix it ever so
| perfectly).
|
| These days, it is pretty much second nature for me to pull
| up a new file & prompt Copilot to complete writing the
| entire code from my comment trails. I don't think I've seen
| as much change in my coding behaviour since _Borland Turbo
| C_ - > _NetBeans_.
| nvarsj wrote:
| I agree. I've just seen it hallucinate too many things that
| on the surface seem very plausible but are complete
| fabrications. Basically my trust is near 0 for anything
| chatgpt, etc. spits out.
|
| My latest challenge is dealing with people that trust
| chatgp to be infallible, and just quote the garbage to make
| themselves look like they know what they are talking about.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I don't think the uptake of LLMs by non-technical people has
| been that dramatic. Nobody in my familial or social circles
| (which spans doctors, lawyers, artists, waitresses, etc.) has
| really mentioned them outside of asking my what I think about
| them.
|
| As for what I think about them: I've been impressed with some
| aspects of code generation, but nothing else has really
| "wowed" me. Prose written with the various GPT models has an
| insincere quality that's impossible to overlook; AI-generated
| art tends to look glossy and overproduced in the same way
| that makes CGI-heavy movies hard to watch. I have not found
| that my Google Search experience was made better by their AI
| experiments; it made it harder, not easier, for me to find
| things.
| falcor84 wrote:
| > ... makes CGI-heavy movies hard to watch
|
| While I absolutely agree that many movies over-use CGI,
| even with the relative decline in superhero movies, CGI-
| heavy movies still top the box office. Going over the list
| of highest-grossing movies each year [0], you have to go
| back about three decades to find a movie that isn't CGI-
| heavy, so apparently they're not that difficult for the
| general public to watch.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-
| grossing_films
| woodruffw wrote:
| True. It's also a rude reality that much of the US uses
| word art and comic sans to advertise things, so I might
| just be a snob. Then again, impressing the snobs _is_ a
| relevant part of the mass adoption curve :-)
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _I 've just had GPT-4o write me a full-featured 2048 clone
| in ~6 hours of casual chat_
|
| May we see it?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| http://jacek.zlydach.pl/v/2048/
|
| https://git.sr.ht/~temporal/aider-2048
|
| There's a full transcript of the interactions with Aider in
| that repo (which I started doing manually before realizing
| Aider saves one of its own...).
|
| Before anyone judges quality of the code - in my defense, I
| literally wrote 0 lines of it :).
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| That works surprisingly well! I mean that I am genuinely
| surprised.
| grumbel wrote:
| Just because it's impactful doesn't mean it's going to make
| much money. Take audiobooks for example, the market is valued
| at around $5 billion. In the very near future audiobooks will
| be created with AI. Does that mean anybody is making billions
| with those AI audiobooks? I don't think so. The value of
| audiobook will go towards $0 and audiobooks as a product
| category will completely disappear. Audiobooks will simply be
| the text2speech feature of your eBook reader.
|
| Similar stuff will happen with a lot of other content, things
| that used to be costly will become very cheap. And then what?
| The amount of books people can consume doesn't scale into
| infinity. Their entertainment needs will be served by auto-
| generated AI content. Even the books themselves will be
| written by AI sooner or later.
|
| Advertising industry might also start hurting badly, as while
| they will certainly try getting ads into AI content, users
| will have AI at home to filter it out. A lot of classic
| tricks and dark pattern to manipulate the user behavior will
| no longer work, since the user has a little AI helper to
| protect them from those tricks.
|
| I don't doubt that the impact of AI will be gigantic, but a
| lot of AI produced content won't be worth anything, since
| it's so easy to create for everybody. And there isn't much of
| a moat either, since new models with better capabilities pop
| up all the time from different companies. Classic lock-in is
| also not really usable anymore, as AI can effortlessly
| translate between different APIs and user-interfaces.
| vasco wrote:
| Why would I watch someone else's AI content when I can
| watch my own with about the same work? It probably takes
| longer to pick something on Netflix than to shout at my TV
| to show me some auto-generated on the fly show about
| whatever I'm feeling like watching right now. Can even be
| building upon itself "show me yesterday's show but in space
| and give it some new twists that I don't expect".
| bamboozled wrote:
| _I 've just had GPT-4o write me a full-featured 2048 clone in
| ~6 hours of casual chat, in between of work, making dinner,
| and playing with kids;_
|
| As cool as this might be, what is the actual economic value
| of this? 2048 is free, you didn't even have to spend a dollar
| to get it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I don't give a damn about economic value of the game - I
| just wanted to have a 2048 that's lean and not powering the
| adtech economy. At the same time, I care about both
| economic and non-monetary value of me leveraging AI tools
| in creating software, so this game was a perfect little
| project to evaluate aider-chat as a tool.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| Being able to create 2048 in 6 hours has basically zero
| economic value.
|
| Can ChatGPT materially and positively impact the code written
| by big companies? Can it do meaningful work in excel? Can it
| do meaningful PowerPoint work? Can it give effective advice
| on management?
|
| Right now we don't know the answer to those questions. LLM
| apps can still improve in many ways - better base models,
| better integration with common enterprise applications,
| agentic processes, verifiability and so on - so there is
| definitely hope that there will be significant value created.
| Companies and people are excited because there's huge
| potential. But it is really just potential right now ...
| current systems aren't creating real enterprise value at this
| moment in time
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Can ChatGPT materially and positively impact the code
| written by big companies? Can it do meaningful work in
| excel? Can it do meaningful PowerPoint work? Can it give
| effective advice on management?_
|
| > _Right now we don't know the answer to those questions._
|
| I know the answer to the first three. Yes, yes, and yes.
| I've done them all, including all of them in the past few
| weeks.
|
| (Which is how I learned that it's much better to ask
| ChatGPT to use Python evaluation mode and Pandoc and make
| you a PPTX, than trying to do anything with "Office 365
| Copilot" in PowerPoint...)
|
| As for the fourth question - well, ChatGPT can give you
| better advice than most advice on management/leadership
| articles, so I presume the answer here is "Yes" too - but I
| didn't verify it in practice.
|
| > _current systems aren't creating real enterprise value at
| this moment in time_
|
| Yes, they are. They would be creating even more value if
| not for the copyright and exports uncertainty, which
| significantly slows enterprise adoption.
| WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW wrote:
| > I know the answer to the first three. Yes, yes, and
| yes.
|
| You say this but from a management perspective at a large
| enterprise software company I have not seen it.
|
| Some of our developers use copilot and gpt and some don't
| and it is incredibly difficult to see any performance
| difference between the groups.
|
| We aren't seeing higher overall levels of productivity.
|
| We aren't seeing the developers who start using
| copilot/gpt rush ahead of their peers.
|
| We aren't seeing any ability to cut back on developer
| spend.
|
| We aren't seeing anything positive _yet_ and many
| developers have been using copilot /gpt for >1 year.
|
| In my opinion we are just regaining some of the economic
| value we lost when Google Search started degrading 5-10
| years ago.
| elicksaur wrote:
| >I can't think of a single recent technology that was so
| widely adopted by tech and non-tech people alike, immediately
| integrated into day-to-day experience.
|
| This is not meant to be an offense, but you are in a bubble.
| The vast, vast majority of people do not use LLMs in their
| day-to-day life. That's ok, we're all in our own bubbles.
|
| You should also post the 2048 clone as proof. Lots people
| saying they built X in Y minutes with AI. But, when it's
| inspected, it's revealed it very obviously doesn't work right
| and needs more development.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _You should also post the 2048 clone as proof._
|
| I posted it twice already in this thread, but I guess third
| time's the charm: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/v/2048/ (code:
| https://git.sr.ht/~temporal/aider-2048).
|
| It's definitely not 100% correct (I just spotted a
| syntactic issue in HTML, for example), and I bet a lot of
| people will find some visual issue on their browser/device
| configuration. I don't care. It works on my desktop, it
| works on my phone, it's even better than the now-
| enshittified web and Android versions I used to play. I'm
| content :).
| epolanski wrote:
| Meanwhile I have the opposite experience.
|
| I have used chatgpt less and less, and bar copilot which is a
| useful autocomplete I just don't have much use for AI.
|
| I know I'm not alone, and even though I've seen many people
| super excited by Dall-E first and chatgpt later they use very
| rarely both of them.
| tootie wrote:
| I can't see any news out of Sequoia without remember how
| massively bullish they were on FTX.
| fragmede wrote:
| they're human and were taken in by con artists. it's a
| reminder that none of us are infallible.
| perlgeek wrote:
| Remember that this is written by Venture Capital investors, and
| they make high risk, high reward bets.
|
| I don't know the exact numbers, but I guess only maybe 5% of
| all investments in a given batch make any impact on the total
| return.
|
| So for a VC, if there's a 10% chance that this whole AI thing
| will be a financial success, it's chance of success is already
| twice as high as average, so a pretty good bet.
| xmprt wrote:
| My rule of thumb is that if someone was super bullish on
| crypto 3 years ago and is now super bullish on AI then their
| opinion is probably not worth that much. But if they've been
| consistently optimistic about AI progress over the last 5-10
| years then they probably know what they're talking about.
| apitman wrote:
| IDK. Blockchains have been super hyped. The tech is undeniably
| cool. But I have yet to see an example of them solving a real
| problem for anyone who's not a criminal.
|
| In contrast, I've put in very little effort to use AI, but I'm
| noticing things.
|
| I see high quality AI-generated images in blog posts. They look
| awesome.
|
| I look over my coworker's shoulder and see vscode predict
| exactly the CSS properties and values he's looking for.
|
| Another coworker uses AI to generate a working example of FPGA
| code that compiles and runs on a Xilinx datacenter device.
|
| An AI assistant pops up in Facebook messenger. My girlfriend
| and I are immediately able to start sending each other high
| quality, ultra-specific inside joke AI generated memes. This
| has added real value to my life.
|
| I'm starting to feel FOMO, a bit worried that if I don't go
| hard on learning this new tool I'm going to be left in the
| dust. To me at least, AI feels different.
| LorenzoBloedow wrote:
| I'll admit blockchains (while they may have potential for the
| future) don't currently have much use in the real world, but
| saying the only people it helps are criminals is just that
| old flawed argument that undermines privacy which in turn
| only benefits oppressors
| apitman wrote:
| I didn't say the only people it helps is criminals. I said
| that's the only example I've seen in the real world. If you
| have more I'd be happy to hear about them.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I have followed one site that has own AI generator for
| certain type of content... And after a while it just start to
| feel samey and soulless... I kinda noticed similar stylistic
| patterns with text generated I have seen posted... Different
| styles can be asked, but I wonder how soon the AI output
| stops feeling worth seeing or reading.
| sumedh wrote:
| > Blockchains have been super hyped.
|
| Were regular people using it like ChatGpt?
| Terr_ wrote:
| > How can anyone be so certain about this?
|
| Oh, it's really simple, you see if they _don 't_ get rewarded
| handsomely, that proves they didn't focus on delivering true
| [Scotsman] value. /s
| paulmd wrote:
| > just like previous technology hype cycles were surely going
| to Change Everything. I mean, we're seeing huge companies'
| entire product strategies changing overnight because We Must
| All Believe.
|
| this didn't really happen the way you want it to. Fortune 50
| companies never spent billions of dollars on crypto or NFTs
| like they are doing for AI. No NASDAQ listed companies got
| trillion-dollar valuations out of crypto.
|
| There is buy-in happening this time, _unlike previous times_ ,
| because this time actually is different.
|
| > The whole AI thing just continues to baffle me. It's like
| everyone is in the same trance and simply assuming and chanting
| over and over that This Will Change Everything
|
| I mean, some people see a broad consensus forming and
| reactively assume everyone else must be stupid (not like ME!).
| That's a reflection of your own personal contrarianism.
|
| Instead, try to realize that a broad consensus forming means
| you actually hold heterodox opinions, and if you think you have
| a good basis for them that's fine, but if the foundation for
| your point that everyone in the world is too stupid to see
| what's REALLY going on then maybe your opinions aren't as
| reasoned as you think they are. You need to at least understand
| the values differences that are leading you down the road to
| different conclusions before you just dismiss the whole thing
| as "everyone else is just too wrapped into the cult to see
| straight".
|
| Bitcoin was actually rebuttable on some easily-explicable
| grounds as to why nobody really needed it. Why do you think
| semantic embeddings, semantic indexes/generation, multimodal
| interfaces, and computationally-tractable
| optimization/approximation generators are not commercially
| useful ideas?
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Instead, try to realize that a broad consensus forming
| means you actually hold heterodox opinions, and if you think
| you have a good basis for them that's fine, but if the
| foundation for your point that everyone in the world is too
| stupid to see what's REALLY going on then maybe your opinions
| aren't as reasoned as you think they are.
|
| I haven't even formed much of an opinion either way, yet.
| Sure, I have doubt, but that's more of a default than
| something I reasoned myself into. I'm saying it's just way
| too early to make statements _either way_ about the future of
| LLMs and AI that are anything beyond wild guesses. "This
| time it's different, it's fundamentally transformative and
| will obviously change the world" is a religious statement
| when made this early.
| fragmede wrote:
| Early would have been with GPT-2 writing bad poems. ChatGPT
| was released 1 year and 7 months ago, so it's still in
| diapers, but at that age it's already providing value to
| its users.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > this didn't really happen the way you want it to. Fortune
| 50 companies never spent billions of dollars on crypto or
| NFTs like they are doing for AI. No NASDAQ listed companies
| got trillion-dollar valuations out of crypto.
|
| nvidia did very well out of crypto.
| geph2021 wrote:
| When you think about the promise (or hype) of
| crypto/bitcoin/blockchain 10 years ago, in some sense it
| augured equally, if not more, transformative change/disruption
| than AI.
|
| Crypto portended drastic and fundamental changes: programmable
| money, disintermediation, and the decentralization of the very
| foundations of our society (i.e. money, banking, commerce).
| Suffice to say that nothing close to this has happened, and
| probably will never happen.
|
| So I can see how many people are equally skeptical that AI, as
| the next hyped transformative technology, will achieve anything
| near the many lofty predictions.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Why is there such an effort to hitch current AI to
| cryptocurrency? They have nothing in common, not the tech,
| and not the way people interact with it.
| postalrat wrote:
| This whole AI thing reminds me of the early 90 and people
| talking about how computers would change the world. Of course
| they were right but probably not in the ways they expected.
| michael_nielsen wrote:
| There's (at least) two meanings for AI: (1) Software systems
| based on extensions of the LLM paradigm; and (2) Software
| systems capable of all human cognitive tasks, and then some.
|
| It's not yet clear what (1) has to do with (2). Maybe it turns
| out that LLMs or similar can do (2). And maybe not.
|
| I can understand being skeptical about the economic value of
| (1). But the economic value of (2) seems obviously enormous,
| almost certainly far more than all value created by humanity to
| date.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I think they've tapped into something fundamental about
| knowledge, the mind, and information and this is only the
| beginning. How many different ways are there to train, wire
| these up, and integrate with other systems? Then the silicon
| built for it...I just don't know where the horizon is.
| root_axis wrote:
| Transformers clearly represent a significant advancement in
| software design, this is undeniable. For example, LLMs are so
| good at language translation that every approach to machine
| translation ever conceived of is now obsolete by a very large
| margin. There are a few other examples and certainly some new
| ones will emerge, so the tech is good and it's here to stay.
|
| The question of "how do we make money from it" is a much harder
| to answer. Using every available computer to run quadratic time
| brute force on everything you can scrape from the internet is
| an unbounded resource sink that offers little practical return
| for almost everybody, but leveraging modest and practical use
| of generative machine learning where it works well will
| absolutely create some real value.
| epolanski wrote:
| I can't summarize it better than saying that AI hype is
| deserved, but the excessive euphoria and FOMO are not.
| danans wrote:
| >> A huge amount of economic value is going to be created by
| AI. Company builders focused on delivering value to end users
| will be rewarded handsomely.
|
| > Such strong speculative predictions about the future, with no
| evidence.
|
| The speculation makes sense from a VC's perspective, but
| perhaps not from the perspective of society at large (i.e.
| human workers).
|
| From the revenue-generating use cases of LLMs (== AI in the
| article) that I've seen so far, most seem to be about replacing
| human mental labor with LLMs.
|
| The replacement of workers with AI-based machines will likely
| happen in mature industries whose market growth is basically
| capped. Productivity will stay mostly the same, but the returns
| will increase dramatically as the human workforce is hollowed
| out.
|
| To the extent that AI instead _empowers_ some workers to
| multiply their productivity with the same amount of effort,
| then it can create more economic value overall, and this may
| happen in industries with a long growth runway ahead.
|
| On balance, it's not clear to me whether the growth (in
| productivity and employment) that comes from the latter will be
| enough to offset the employment losses from the former.
|
| But in either scenario, the VCs investing in AI win, either
| from efficiency gains, or from accelerating growth in new
| industries.
| rsynnott wrote:
| They're a _VC_. If they don't believe in it, what are they even
| doing? You can't really expect them to be particularly
| objective about it.
| dvt wrote:
| > In reality, the road ahead is going to be a long one. It will
| have ups and downs. But almost certainly it will be worthwhile.
|
| The biggest takeaway from this piece is the stark realism of this
| article (maybe a bit too bearish, imo) compared to the usual
| Sequoia VC-speak. Maybe FTX _did_ teach them something, after
| all.
| mike_d wrote:
| VCs in general hate core AI because it is dominated by large
| players that don't need VC money to be successful. If someone
| was taking Sequoia money to buy GPUs they'd be singing a
| completely different tune.
| smeeth wrote:
| I don't think FTX is the right contrast here. This document is
| mostly about business realism: revenue, margins, etc.
|
| VCs did get burned by speculative investing in the 2019-21
| period but FTX wasn't like the others. At the time of its
| collapse, FTX was profitable and had $1+ bn in revenue, its
| doom had nothing to do with product market fit, revenue,
| margins, etc.
|
| Quibi might be a more relevant example of a learning
| opportunity.
| dvt wrote:
| > I don't think FTX is the right contrast here.
|
| Comparing this article to the (now deleted) SBF profile is
| night and day.
| openrisk wrote:
| > Those who remain level-headed through this moment have the
| chance to build extremely important companies.
|
| But in which sector will these extemely important companies be
| active? Adtech? Knowledge management / productivity tools? Some
| completely new category?
|
| What is an undeniable fact is the drastic commodization of the
| hardware / software stack for certain classes of algorithms. How
| is this technological development going to be absorbed and
| internalized by the economy feels still rather uncertain.
| sumedh wrote:
| > But in which sector will these extemely important companies
| be active?
|
| I dont think anyone knows the answer to that question.
| lqprag wrote:
| As always, free analysis by VCs and investment banks is not
| necessarily for the reader's benefit.
|
| So we have this bearish piece and the previous bearish Goldman
| Sachs piece. While I agree with their analysis in this case,
| there is a lingering doubt that some banks might just want to
| tank Nvidia a little in order to go long. Or something like that.
| Animats wrote:
| _" Unlike the CPU cloud, which became an oligopoly, new entrants
| building dedicated AI clouds continue to flood the market.
| Without a monopoly or oligopoly, high fixed cost + low marginal
| cost businesses almost always see prices competed down to
| marginal cost (e.g., airlines)."_
|
| So why aren't there more entrants in the CPU cloud area? The
| technology is a commodity. Google and Amazon don't make CPUs.
| wmf wrote:
| The secret sauce in the cloud is not hardware but control
| plane, networking, and storage software.
| falcor84 wrote:
| And battle-tested SREs
| mike_d wrote:
| > So why aren't there more entrants in the CPU cloud area?
|
| Because the market is saturated with players.
|
| AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba, IBM Cloud, Digital Ocean, Tencent,
| Oracle Cloud, Huawei Cloud, that Dell/VMware thing,
| Linode/Akamai, HP, Scaleway, Vultr, GoDaddy, OVH, Hetzner, etc.
| Animats wrote:
| So are margins low?
| jamessinghal wrote:
| Would the Graviton CPUs from Amazon and upcoming Axion from
| Google not count?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The technology is, but operations isn't. Anyone can start a CPU
| cloud. Fewer can run it reliably (there are plenty of those at
| regional level, though). Very few can do it on a global scale,
| and break through the mindset of Amazon, Google and Microsoft
| being the only options.
| mike_d wrote:
| The calculations here seem to depend on a few false assumptions:
|
| 1. That all datacenter GPUs being purchased are feeding AI. You
| might be able to argue that some are or a lot are, but you don't
| know how many just looking at Nvidia sales numbers. I know of at
| least two projects deploying rows of cabinets in datacenters full
| of GPUs for non-AI workloads.
|
| 2. The assumption that pay-for-an-API is the only AI business
| model. What we now call "AI" has been driving Google's search and
| ad businesses for nearly a decade, sooo AI is already doing
| $300B/yr in revenue? There is no way for this guy to quantify how
| AI is solving problems that aren't SaaS.
|
| David Chan, if you are reading this feel free to email me if you
| want a fact check for what will surely be the third installment
| in the series.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| According to Jensen it takes about 8000 H100s running for 90 days
| to train a 1.8 Trillion param MoE GPT-4 scale model.
|
| Meta has about 350,000 of these GPUs and a whole bunch of A100s.
| This means the ability to train 50 GPT-4 scale models every 90
| days or 200 such models per year.
|
| This level of overkill suggests to me that the core models will
| be commoditized to oblivion, making the actual profit margins
| from AI-centric companies close to 0, especially if Microsoft and
| Meta keep giving away these models for free.
|
| This is actually terrible for investors, but amazing for builders
| (ironically).
|
| The real value methinks is actually over the control of
| proprietary data used for training which is the single most
| important factor for model output quality. And this is actually
| as much an issue for copyright lawyers rather than software
| engineers once the big regulatory hammers start dropping to
| protect American workers.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| A lot of those GPUs are for their 3B users to run inferencing,
| no?
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| True that, but I think in a very short amount of time, using
| dedicated general purpose GPUs just for inferencing is going
| to be mega overkill.
|
| If there's dedicated inferencing silicon (like say the thing
| created by Groq), all those GPUs will be power sucking
| liabilities, and then the REAL singularity superintelligence
| level training can begin.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| It's like someone thinking that they are SOOOO smart, they are
| going to get rich selling shovels in the gold rush. So they
| overpay for the land, they overpay for the factory, they
| overpay for their sales staff.
|
| And then someone else starts giving away shovels for free.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > And then someone else starts giving away shovels for free.
|
| And _their_ business model is shovel-fleet _logistics and
| maintenance_... :p
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| And/or exploiting the legal infrastructure around
| intellectual property rights to make sure only hobbyists
| and geologists can use the shovels without paying through
| the nose or getting sued into oblivion.
| woah wrote:
| The platform for shovel fleet logistics startups
| apitman wrote:
| I thought AI is supposed to put all the lawyers out of work.
| threeseed wrote:
| Lexis+ AI and Ask Practical Law AI systems produced incorrect
| information more than 17% of the time, while Westlaw's AI-
| Assisted Research hallucinated more than 34% of the time:
|
| https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-trial-legal-models-
| hallucin...
| falcor84 wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, what's the human lawyer baseline on
| that?
| vasco wrote:
| The infinitely expanding AI-generated metaverse isn't going to
| render itself, at least in the case of meta I think that might
| be one of the only pieces missing.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Many of the winners haven't even been formed yet. And most of the
| losers have already lost, they just don't know it yet.
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| The problem with AI is that it's very much a gimmick and
| consumers don't have much use for gimmicks. Certainly not when it
| works half the time and hallucinating the other half. All it
| takes is an NBER announcement to pop this mania.
| matchagaucho wrote:
| There's a growing divide between inference GPUs and training
| GPUs.
|
| Investors first need to ask what that ratio might look like in 10
| years. 10-to-1? 100-to-1? Inference-to-Training
|
| Assuming for each NVDA training GPU sold there are 100 open
| source / commodity GPUs doing inference, who owns and supplies
| those data centers and hardware?
| dzink wrote:
| AI is dangerous to VCs.
|
| The returns are going to chip-makers and employers, including
| single founder startups, who don't have to hire a lot of people,
| and additionally get productivity they never thought possible. A
| surgeon I know uses AI every day - to translate, to explain, to
| figure out problems, to write. They wouldn't have paid someone to
| do that, but now they get that output in seconds. This is a time
| to solve all kinds of problems we didn't think possible - because
| AI has made the enterprising among us instantly smarter.
|
| All the fodder about AGI being a next step is smoke and mirrors -
| for everyone using OpenAI knows they don't need any more niche
| tools as their one $20 subscription is doing more for them every
| day. AGI is here. Experts can correct AI generated mistakes, but
| those are getting less and less too. The real benchmark is: Name
| how many people you know who can out-do ChatGPT on a question.
| You won't bother to check LinkedIn for that.
|
| The gains are aggregating towards Chips, Clouds and
| Entrepreneurs. The VCs, since A16Z's original AI blog post (all
| expense, little return, echoed this Sequoia post but did it but
| years ago), know they are not needed as much anymore. Fewer VCs
| will beat the market when founders can grow startups without
| raising too much money (they don't need to hire as many people).
| Hiring needs lead to PR waves which require VC funding. Valuation
| is not a big deal for founders making money either, so they may
| not even disclose how successful their companies are. Bragging
| about your gains only invites competition. So other than ponzi-
| type ventures where you need to attract the dinner to serve
| dinner, you won't hear much about the good ones.
|
| A different era indeed. The tech giants are in for a lot of
| change as well. Those who have distribution may try to push their
| models to the masses to be the point of reference, but that can
| get expensive, especially for those who don't charge. AI will
| help improve AI performance as well and that means cheaper better
| performance with time.
|
| What's most needed in this era are people who know what the world
| needs that hasn't been invented yet. They need to be inventing
| and monetizing it. Little stopping you now.
| nojvek wrote:
| Well written argument.
|
| The holy grail of AI is still in future. Where it can interact
| with software tools like we do. Competent AI Agents will be a
| huge productivity unlock.
| anon-3988 wrote:
| This. Whenever AI come up, people are quick to think of
| automations completely making every jobs obsolete. But that is
| probably not going to happen. What is probably going to happen
| is that we are going to have 1 artist handling 10x more
| commissions because they can just use AI to do 90% of the work
| and just cleanup afterwards.
|
| I am also using this to solve problems that are usually
| delegated to junior developers. I get faster results (that I
| would have to fix up anyways) for far less effort.
| threeseed wrote:
| This is the sort of grifter/influencer style comment that we
| saw in crypto and now pervasive in AI.
|
| Not just that AI is a great tool that will over time have a
| significant impact on society. It's the breathless hype e.g. we
| have AGI today, society will be instantly smarter because of it
| and every tool and employee will be impacted. The FOMO i.e. you
| must jump on board now or be left behind. And the complete lack
| of any data or evidence.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Has anyone asked will AI actually very soon be commodity tech?
| With too many players competing with each other driving prices to
| bottom? Is there actually meaningful value to extract, after you
| have spend money on hardware and power?
|
| Modern web is full of examples of platforms that really don't
| make money...
| pedalpete wrote:
| I think this is the correct take. My understanding of the article
| is that huge investments in hardware, mostly to NVIDIA, and
| spending by major tech companies is currently defining the
| market, even if we include OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. It is FAANG
| money they are running on.
|
| I put this as equivalent to investing in Sun Microsystems and
| Netscape in the late 90s. We knew the internet was going to
| change the world, and we were right, but we were completely wrong
| as to how, and where the money would flow.
| nabla9 wrote:
| 38 OECD countries have combined population 1.38 billion, GDP
| $49.6 trillion
|
| $600 billion is $434 per person, $36 per month per person, 1.2%
| percent of GDP.
|
| If 75% of the spending goes to increasing productivity, I could
| see it. Get rid of $450 billion in labor costs (12 - 15 million
| work years). Cut worked hours in call centers, customer service,
| many services, menial programming jobs, ...
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| This is not an AI or ML problem. This is an Nvidia, Google,
| Microsoft, Meta, Tesla, etc. problem.
|
| Most AI startups aren't building massive data centers so they're
| unaffected. Most money isn't spent on compute in most startups.
| Only a few companies spend big.
|
| It's obviously a terrible idea to invest massive amounts into
| compute when Nvidia's profit margins are so astronomical if you
| need ROI in the long term. The massive corporations won't get
| their money back for these investments; but they don't have to.
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