[HN Gopher] The AI Investment Boom
___________________________________________________________________
The AI Investment Boom
Author : m-hodges
Score : 103 points
Date : 2024-10-20 14:56 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apricitas.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apricitas.io)
| apwell23 wrote:
| > AI products are used ubiquitously to generate code, text, and
| images, analyze data, automate tasks, enhance online platforms,
| and much, much, much more--with usage expected only to increase
| going forward.
|
| Why does every hype article start with this. Personally my
| copilot usage has gone down while coding. I tried and tried but
| it always gets lost and starts spitting out subtle bugs that
| takes me more time to debug than if i had written it myself.
|
| I always have this feeling of 'this might fail in production in
| unknown ways' because i might have missed checking the code
| throughly . I know i am not the only one, my coworkers and
| friends have expressed similar feelings.
|
| I even tried the new 'chain of thought' model, which for some
| reason seems to be even worse.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Well I have the exact opposite experience. I don't know why
| people struggle to get good results with llms.
| thuuuomas wrote:
| Would you feel comfortable pushing generated code to
| production unaudited?
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Would you feel comfortable pushing human code to production
| unaudited?
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Only on Fridays before a three day weekend.
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| depends on the human.
|
| but i would never push llm generated code. never.
|
| -
|
| edit to add some substance:
|
| if it's someone who
|
| * does a lot of manual local testing
|
| * adds good unit / integration tests
|
| * writes clear and well documented PRs
|
| * knows the code style, and when to break it
|
| * tests themselves in a staging environment, independent
| of any QA team or reviews
|
| * monitors the changes after they've gone out
|
| * has repeatedly found things in their own PRs and asked
| to hold off release to fix them
|
| * is reviewing other people's PRs and spotting things
| before they go out
|
| yea, sure, i'll release the changes. they're doing the
| auditing work for me.
|
| they clearly care about the software. and i've seen
| enough to trust them.
|
| and if they got it wrong, well, shit, they did everything
| good enough. i'm sure they'll be on the ball when it
| comes to rolling it back and/or fixing it.
|
| an llm does not do those things. an llm *does not care
| about your software* and never will.
|
| i'll take people who give a shit any day of the week.
| amonith wrote:
| I'd say it depends more on "the production" than the
| human. There are legal means to hold all people
| accountable for their actions ("Gross neglience" and all
| that). So you can basically always trust that people will
| fix what they messed up given the possibility. So if you
| can afford for the production to be broken (e.g. the
| downtime will just annoy some people) you might as well
| allow your team to deploy straight to prod without
| audits. It's not that rare actually.
| charrondev wrote:
| For my I have a company subscription for Copilot and I just
| use the line based autocomplete. It's mildly better than
| the built in autocomplete. I never have it do more than
| though and probably wouldn't buy a license for myself.
| hnthrowaway6543 wrote:
| LLMs are great for simple, common tasks, i.e. CRUD apps,
| RESTful web endpoints, unit tests, for which there's an
| enormous amount of examples and not much unique complexity.
| There's a lot of developers whose day mostly involves these
| repetitive, simple tasks. There's also a lot of developers
| who work on things that are a lot more niche and complicated,
| where LLMs don't provide much help.
| 101008 wrote:
| Yeah, exactly this. If I ask Cursor to write the serializer
| for a new Django model, it does it (although sometimes it
| invents fields that do not exist). It saves me 2 minute.
|
| When I ask him to write a function that should do something
| much more complex, it usually do something so bad it takes
| me more time because it confuses me and now I have to back
| to my original reasoning (after trying to understand what
| it did).
|
| What I found useful is to ask him to explain me what a
| function does in a new codebase I am exploring, although I
| have to be very careful because a lot of time invents or
| skips steps that are crucial.
| dartos wrote:
| See, I recently picked up the Ash framework for elixir
| and it does all that too, but in a declarative, precise
| language which codegens the implementation in a
| deterministic way.
|
| It just does the job that cursor does there, but better.
|
| Maybe us programmers should focus on making higher order
| programming tools instead of black box text generators
| for existing tools.
| danenania wrote:
| In my experience this underrates them. They can do pretty
| complex tasks that go well beyond your examples if prompted
| correctly.
|
| The real limiting factor is not so much task complexity as
| the level of abstraction and indirection. If you have code
| that requires following a long chain of references to
| understand, LLMs will struggle to work with it.
|
| For similar reasons, they also struggle with:
|
| - generic types
|
| - inheritance hierarchies
|
| - long function call chains
|
| - dependency injection
|
| - deeply nested structures
|
| They're also bad at counting, which can be an issue when
| dealing with concurrency--i.e. you started 5 operations
| concurrently at different points in your program and now
| need to block while waiting for 5 corresponding success or
| failure messages. Unless your code explicitly uses the
| number 5 somewhere, an LLM is often going to fail at
| counting the operations.
|
| All in all, the main question I think in determining how
| well an LLM can do a task is whether the limiting factor
| for your task is knowledge or abstraction. If it's
| knowledge (the intricacies of some arcane OS API, for
| example), an LLM can do _very_ well with good prompting
| even on quite large and complex tasks. If it 's
| abstraction, it's likely to fail in all kinds of seemingly
| obvious ways.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > LLMs are great for simple, common tasks, i.e. CRUD apps,
| RESTful web endpoints
|
| i gave it a yaml and asked it to generate a json call to
| rest api . It missed a bunch of keys and made up a random
| new key. I threw out the whole thing and did it with
| awk/sed.
| amonith wrote:
| Seriously though, what are you doing? Every single example
| everywhere throughout the internet that tries to show how
| good AI is at programming shows so mindbogglingly simplistic
| examples that it's getting annoying. It sure is a great
| learning tool when you're trying to do something experimental
| in a new stack or completely new project, I'll give you that,
| but once you reach the skill level where someone would hire
| you to be an X developer (which most developers disagreeing
| with you are, mid+ developers of some stack X) the thing
| becomes a barely useful autocomplete. Maybe that's the
| problem? It's just not a tool for professional developers?
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| I am happy with the LLMs, but I only tried them on small
| projects done at my free time.
|
| As a back end developer I am not familiar with the latest
| trends in JavaScript and CSS, and frankly I do not want to
| spend my time studying these. A LLM can generate an
| interactive web game based on my description. I review the
| code, it is usually okay, sometimes I suggest an
| improvement. I _could_ have done all of that -- but it
| would take me a week, and the LLM does it in seconds. So it
| is a difference between a hobby project done or not done.
|
| I also tried a LLM at work, not to code, but to explain
| some complex topics that were new to me. Once it provided a
| great high-level description that was very useful. And once
| it provided a great explanation... which was a total lie,
| as I found out when I tried to do a hello-world example. I
| still think the 50% success rate is great, as long as you
| can quickly verify it.
|
| Shortly, we need to know the strengths and the weaknesses,
| and use the LLMs accordingly. Too much trust will get you
| burned. But properly used, they can save a lot of time.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I mean, let me just throw in an example here: I am
| currently working on https://guesspage.github.io , which is
| basically https://getguesstimate.com but for flowtext
| instead of a spreadsheet. The site is ... 99.9% Claude
| Sonnet written. I have literally only been debugging and
| speccing.
|
| Sonnet can absolutely get very confused and break things.
| And there were tasks where I had a really hard time getting
| it to do the right thing, or understand what I wanted. But
| I need you to understand: Sonnet made this thing for me in
| _two and a half days_ of part-time prompting. That is
| probably ten times faster than it would have taken me on my
| own, especially as I have absolutely no design ability.
|
| Now, is this a big project? No, it's like 2kloc. But I
| don't think you can call it "simple" exactly. It's
| potentially useful technology. This sort of "just make this
| small tool exist for me" is where I see most of the value
| for AI in the next year. And the definition of "small tool"
| can stretch surprisingly far.
| hnthrowaway6543 wrote:
| This _is_ a simple project. Nobody is disputing that
| GenAI can automate a large chunk of the initial setup
| work, which dominates the time spent on small projects
| like this. But 99.999% of professional, paid software
| development is _not_ working on the basic React
| infrastructure for a 2,000 loc javascript app.
|
| Also your Google Drive API key is easily discoverable
| with about 15 seconds of looking at the JS source code --
| this is something a professional software developer would
| (hopefully) have picked up without you asking, but an LLM
| isn't going to tell you that you shouldn't ship the
| `const API_KEY = ...` code as a file to the client,
| because you didn't ask.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| > This is a simple project.
|
| I mean, it would have taken me a lot longer on my own.
| Sure it's not a huge project, I agree; I wouldn't call it
| entirely trivial.
|
| > Also your Google Drive API key is easily discoverable
| with about 15 seconds of looking at the JS source code
|
| No, I'm aware of that. That's deliberate. There's no way
| to avoid it for a serverless webapp. (Note that Guesspage
| is entirely hosted on Github Pages.) All the data stored
| is public anyways, the key is limited to only have
| permission to access the stored data, and you still have
| to log in and grab a token that is only stored in your
| browser and cannot be accessed from other sites.
| Literally the only unique thing you can do with it is
| trigger a login request on your own site that looks like
| it comes from Guesspage; and you can do that just as
| easily by creating a new API key and setting its name to
| "Guesspage".
|
| The AI actually told me that was unsafe, and I corrected
| it. To the best of my understanding, the only thing that
| you can do with the API key is do Google Drive uploads to
| your own drive or that of someone who lets you that look
| to Google as if my app is triggering them. If there's a
| danger that can arise from that, and I don't think there
| is, then it's on me, not on Sonnet.
|
| (It's also referer domain limited, but that's worthless.
| If only there was a way to cryptographically sign a
| referer...)
| threeseed wrote:
| I just asked Claude to generate some code using the SAP
| SuccessFactors API.
|
| Every single example was completely useless. The code
| wouldn't compile, it would invent methods and variables and
| the instructions to go along with it were incoherent. All
| whilst gaslighting along with the way.
|
| I have also previously tried using it with some Golang code
| and it would constantly add weird statements e.g. locking on
| non-concurrent operations.
|
| LLMs are great when you are doing the same things as everyone
| else. Step outside of that and it's far more trouble than
| it's worth.
| sksxihve wrote:
| Because they all use AI to write the articles.
| Ekaros wrote:
| There is a market for AI. And it is exactly these articles
| and maybe pictures attached to them. Soon could be some
| videos as well. But how far beyond that. Is very good
| question.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| AI trained on a web that's primarily about selling things
| bugbuddy wrote:
| This just reminded I forgot I have had a Copilot subscription.
| It has not made any useful code suggestions in months to the
| point of fading from my memory. I just logged in to cancel it.
| Now, I need to check my other subscriptions that I can cancel
| or reduce to a lower tier.
| falcor84 wrote:
| From my experience, it is getting better over time, and I
| believe that there's still a lot of relatively low hanging
| fruit, particularly in terms of integrating the LLM with the
| language server protocol and other tooling. But having said
| that, at this point in time, it's just not good enough for
| independent work, so I would suggest using it only as you would
| pair-program with a mid-level human developer who doesn't have
| much context on the project, and has a short attention span. In
| particular, I generally only have the AI help me with one
| function/refactoring at a time, and in a way that is easy for
| me to test as we go, and am finding immense value.
| dangerwill wrote:
| I think some of the consternation we see from the anti LLM
| crowd (of which I'm one) is this line of reasoning. These
| LLMs produce fine code when the code you are asking for is in
| its training set. So they can be better than a mid level dev
| and much faster in narrow, unknown contexts. But with no
| feedback to warn you, if you ask it for code that it has no
| or only a bit of data on, it is much worse than a rubber
| duck.
|
| That and tech's status inflation means when we are talking
| about "mid level" engineers, really we are talking about
| engineers with a couple years of experience who have just
| graduated to the training wheels phase of producing
| production code. LLMs are still broadly aimed at removing the
| need for what I would just call junior engineers.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| That and the fact that code does not live in a standalone
| bubble, but in a complex setup of OSes, APIs, middleware
| and other languages. My experience trying to use Claude to
| help me with that was disappointing.
| drowsspa wrote:
| Yeah, it's actually frustrating that even when writing Go code,
| which is statically typed, it keeps messing up the arguments
| order. That would seem to me a pretty easy thing to generate.
|
| Although it's much better when writing standard REST and gRPC
| APIs
| righthand wrote:
| I see the same results as my TabNine+Template
| generator+language server as I do with things like CoPilot. I
| get TabNine issues when the code base isn't huge. I think also
| tossing away language servers and template generators for just
| LLM will just lead to seeking "proper predictive path". Most of
| the time the LLM will spit out the create-express/react-
| template for you, when you ask it to customize it will guess
| using the most common patterns. Do you need something to guess
| for you?
|
| It's also getting worse because people are poisoning the well.
| badgersnake wrote:
| It's kinda true though. They are increasingly used for those
| things. Sure, the results are terrible and doing it without AI
| almost always yields better results but that doesn't seem to
| stop people.
|
| Look at this nonsense for example: https://intouch.family/en
| anon7725 wrote:
| That's one of the saddest bits of AI enshittification yet.
| 123yawaworht456 wrote:
| holy shit, if that isn't satire... wow, just fucking wow.
| osigurdson wrote:
| My feeling is (current) AI is more of a teacher than an
| implementor. It really does help when learning about something
| new or to give you ideas about directions to take. The actual
| code however still needs to be written by humans for the most
| part it seems.
|
| AI is a great tool and does speed things up massively, it just
| doesn't align with the magical thought that we provide the
| ideas and AI does all of the grunt work. In general, always
| better to form mental models about things based on actual
| evidence as opposed to fantasy (and there is a lot of fantasy
| involved at the moment). This doesn't mean being pessimistic
| about potential future advancements however. It is just very
| hard to predict what the shape of those improvements will be.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| My experience is similar. I used Claude for a coding task
| recently and it drove me into an infinite number of rabbit
| holes, each one seeming worse than the previous one. All the
| while being enable to stop and say: I'm sorry, I actually don't
| know how to help you.
| uxhacker wrote:
| It feels like there's a big gap in this discussion. The focus is
| almost entirely on GPU and hardware investment, which is
| undeniably driving a lot of the current AI boom. But what's
| missing is any mention of the software side and the significant
| VC investment going into AI-driven platforms, tools, and
| applications. This story could be more accurately titled 'The GPU
| Investment Boom' given how heavily it leans into the hardware
| conversation. Software investment deserves equal attention
| pfisherman wrote:
| Also they talk a lot about data centers and cloud compute, but
| do not mention chips for on decide inference.
|
| Given where mobile sits in the hierarchy of interfaces, that is
| where I would be placing my bets if I were a VC.
| _delirium wrote:
| Is there a good estimate of the split? My impression from AI
| startups whose operations I know something about is that a
| majority of their VC raise is currently going back into paying
| for hardware directly or indirectly, even though they aren't
| hardware startups per se, but I don't have any solid numbers.
| bbor wrote:
| I think your analysis is spot on, based on my expertise of
| "reading too much hacker news since every day since March
| 2023". This Bain report[1] barely mentions "Independent
| Software Vendors" and when they do it's clearly an
| afterthought, and the only software focused takes I can find
| are[2] extremely speculative, e.g. "For every
| dollar invested in hardware, we expect 8-to-20 times the
| amount to be spent on software... While the initial wave of
| AI investment lays the foundational infrastructure, the next
| wave is clearly set to capitalise on the burgeoning AI
| software market."
|
| I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable about capital markets
| can fill us in here, I'd be curious to see some hard numbers
| still! Maybe this is what a Bloomberg terminal does...?
|
| Regardless, I think this makes a lot of sense; there's no
| clear scientific consensus on the path forward for these
| models other than "keep going?", so building out preparatory
| infrastructure is seen as the clear, safe move. As the common
| refrain goes: "in a gold rush, sell shovels!"
|
| As a big believer in the upcoming cognitive era of software
| and society, I would only add a short bit onto the end of
| that saying: "...until the hydraulic mining cannons[3] come
| online."
|
| [1] https://www.bain.com/insights/ais-trillion-dollar-
| opportunit...
|
| [2] https://www.privatebankerinternational.com/comment/is-ai-
| sof...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_mining
| aurareturn wrote:
| I think GPUs and datacenter is to AI is what fiber was to the
| dotcom boom.
|
| A lot of LLM based software is uneconomical because we don't
| have enough compute and electricity for what they're trying to
| do.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The actual physical fiber was useful after the companies
| popped though.
|
| GPUs are different, unless things go _very_ poorly, these
| GPUs should be pretty much obsolete after 10 years.
|
| The ecosystem for GPGPU software and the ability to design
| and manufacture new GPUs might be like fiber. But that is
| different because it doesn't become a useful thing at rest,
| it only works while Nvidia (or some successor) is still
| running.
|
| I do think that ecosystem will stick around. Whatever the
| next thing after AI is, I bet Nvidia has a good enough stack
| at this point to pivot to it. They are _the_ vendor for these
| high-throughput devices: CPU vendors will never keep up with
| their ability to just go wider, and coders are good enough
| nowadays to not need the crutch of lower latency that CPUs
| provide (well actually we just call frameworks written by
| cleverer people, but borrowing smarts is a form of
| cleverness).
|
| But we do need somebody to keep releasing new versions of
| CUDA.
| aurareturn wrote:
| But computer chips have always had limited usefulness
| because newer chips are simply faster and more efficient.
| The datacenter build outs and increase in electricity
| capacity will always be useful.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Reading this makes me willing to bet that this capital intensive
| investment boom will be similar to other enormous capital
| investment booms in US history, such as the laying of the
| railroads in the 1800s, the proliferation of car companies in the
| early 1900s, and the telecom fiber boom in the late 1900s. In all
| of these cases there was an enormous infrastructure (over) build
| out, followed by a crash where nearly all the companies in the
| industry ended up in bankruptcy, but then that original
| infrastructure build out had huge benefits for the economy and
| society as that infrastructure was "soaked up" in the subsequent
| years. E.g. think of all the telecom investment and subsequent
| bankruptcies in the late 90s/early 00s, but then all that dark
| fiber that was laid was eventually lit up and allowed for the
| explosion of high quality multimedia growth (e.g. Netflix and the
| like).
|
| I think that will happen here. I think your average _investor_
| who 's currently paying for all these advanced chips, data
| centers and energy supplies will walk away sorely disappointed,
| but this investment will yield huge dividends down the road.
| Heck, I think the energy investment alone will end up
| accelerating the switch away from fossil fuels, despite AI often
| being portrayed as a giant climate warming energy hog (which I'm
| not really disputing, but now that renewables are the cheapest
| form of energy, I believe this huge, well-funded demand will
| accelerate the growth of non-carbon energy sources).
| candiddevmike wrote:
| What will be the advantage of having a bunch of obsolete
| hardware? All I see is more e-waste.
| wslh wrote:
| I don't think the parent was specifically referring to
| hardware alone. The 'rails' in this context are also the AI
| algorithms and the underlying software. New research and
| development could lead to breakthroughs that allow us to use
| significantly less hardware than we currently do. Just as the
| dot-com crash wasn't solely about the physical infrastructure
| but also about protocols like HTTP, I believe the AI boom
| will involve advancements beyond just hardware. There may be
| short-term excess, but the long-term benefits, particularly
| on the software side, could be immense.
| iTokio wrote:
| Well, at least they are paving the way to more efficient
| hardware, GPU are way, way more energy efficient than CPU and
| the parallel architectures are the only remaining way to
| scale compute.
|
| But yes, a lot of energy wasted in the growing phase.
| dartos wrote:
| GPUs are different than CPUs.
|
| They're way more efficient at matmuls, but start throwing
| branching logic at them and they slow down a lot.
|
| Literally a percentage of their cores will noop while
| others are executing a branch, since all cores are
| lockstep.
| aurareturn wrote:
| >But yes, a lot of energy wasted in the growing phase.
|
| Why exactly is energy wasted during this phase?
|
| Are you expecting hardware to become obsolete much faster?
| But that only depends on TSMC's node cadence, which is
| still 2-3 years. Therefore, AI hardware will still be bound
| to TSMC's cadence.
| goda90 wrote:
| Even if the hardware quickly becomes outdated, I'm not sure
| it'll become worthless so quickly. And there's also the
| infrastructure of the data center and new electricity
| generation to power them. Another thing that might survive a
| crash and carry on to help the future is all the code used to
| support valuable use cases.
| almost_usual wrote:
| In the case of dark fiber the hardware was fine, wavelength
| division multiplexing was created which increased capacity by
| 100x in some cases crashing demand for new fiber.
|
| I think OP is suggesting AI algorithms and training methods
| will be improve resulting in enormous performance gains with
| existing hardware causing a similar surplus of infrastructure
| and crash in demand.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| How much of current venture spending is going into reusable
| R&D that can be moved forward in time the way that physical
| infrastructure in their examples were able to be used in
| the future?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Do you expect better hardware to suddenly start appearing on
| the market, fully-formed from the brow of Zeus?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Maybe the bust will be so rough that TSMC will go out of
| business, and then these graphics cards will not go obsolete
| for quite a while.
|
| Like Intel and Samsung might make a handful of better chips
| or whatever, but neither of their business models really
| involve being TSMC. So if the bubble pop took out TSMC, there
| wouldn't be a new TSMC for a while.
| aurareturn wrote:
| >What will be the advantage of having a bunch of obsolete
| hardware? All I see is more e-waste.
|
| The energy build out, data centers are not wasted. You can
| swap out A100 GPUs for BH200 GPUs in the same datacenter.
| A100s will be 5 years old when Blackwell is out - which is
| just about right for how long datacenter chips are expected
| to last.
|
| I do, however, think that the industry will move to newer
| hardware faster to try to squeeze as much efficiency as
| possible due to the energy bottleneck. Therefore, I expect
| TSMC's N2 nodes to have huge demand. In fact, TSMC themselves
| have said designs for N2 far outnumber N3 at the same stage
| of the node. This is most likely due to AI companies that
| want to increase efficiency due to the lack of electricity.
| bwanab wrote:
| While I agree with your essential conclusions, I don't think
| the automobile companies really fit. Many of the early 1900s
| companies (e.g. Ford, GM, Mercedes, even Chrysler) are still
| among the largest auto companies in the world.
| throwaway20222 wrote:
| There were hundreds of failed automotive companies and parts
| suppliers though. I think the argument is that many will die,
| some will survive and take all (most)
| aurareturn wrote:
| But that happens in every bubble. Over investment,
| consolidation, huge winners in the end, and maybe
| eventually a single monopoly.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| There isn't a rule as to how it plays out. No huge
| winners in cars, no huge winners in rail. Lots of huge
| winners in internet.
| cloud_hacker wrote:
| > While I agree with your essential conclusions, I don't
| think the automobile companies really fit. Many of the early
| 1900s companies (e.g. Ford, GM, Mercedes, even Chrysler) are
| still among the largest auto companies in the world.
|
| American Automative filled for Bankruptcy multiple times.
|
| American Government had to step in to back them up and bail
| them out.
| nemo44x wrote:
| That phase is called consolidation. It's part of the cycle.
| The speculative over leveraged and mismanaged companies get
| merged into the winners or disappear if they have nothing of
| value.
| grecy wrote:
| A couple of them went bankrupt and got bailouts.
| aurareturn wrote:
| I'm sure you are right. At some point, the bubble will crash.
|
| The question remains is when the bubble will crash. We could be
| in the 1995 equivalent of the dotcom boom and not 1999. If so,
| we have 4 more years of high growth and even after the crash,
| the market will still be much bigger in 2029 than in 2024.
| Cisco was still 4x bigger in 2001 than in 1995.
|
| One thing that is slightly different from past bubbles is that
| the more compute you have, the smarter and more capable AI.
|
| One gauge I use to determine if we are still at the beginning
| of the boom is this: Does Slack sell an LLM chatbot solution
| that is able to give me reliable answers to business/technical
| decisions made over the last 2 years in chat? We don't have
| this yet - most likely because it's probably still too
| expensive to do this much inference with such high context
| window. We still need a lot more compute and better models.
|
| Because of the above, I'm in the camp that believe we are
| actually closer to the beginning of the bubble than at the end.
|
| Another thing I would watch closely to see when the bubble
| might pop is if LLM scaling laws are quickly breaking down and
| that more compute no longer yields more intelligence in an
| economical way. If so, I think the bubble would pop. All eyes
| are on GPT5-class models for signs.
| vladgur wrote:
| Re: Slack chat:
|
| Glean.com does it for the enterprise I work at: It consumes
| all of our knowledge sources including Slack, Google docs,
| wiki, source code and provides answers to complex specific
| questions in a way that's downright magical.
|
| I was converted into a believer when I described an issue to
| it, pointers to a source file in online git repo and it
| pointed me to another repository that my team did not own
| that controlled DNS configs that we were not aware about.
| These configs were the reason our code did not behave as we
| expected.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Thanks. I didn't know that existed. But does it scale?
| Would it still work if large companies with many millions
| of Slack messages?
|
| I suppose one reason Slack doesn't have a solution yet is
| because they're having a hard time getting it to work for
| large companies.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Yeah, Glean does this and there are a bunch of other
| competitors that do it as well.
|
| I think you may be confused about the length of the
| context window. These tools don't pull all of your Slack
| history into the context window. They use a RAG approach
| to index all of your content into a vector DB, then when
| you make a query only the relevant document snippets are
| pulled into the context window. It's similar for example
| to how Cursor implements repository-wide AI queries.
| aurareturn wrote:
| I'm aware that one can't feed millions of messages into
| an LLM all at once. The only way to do this now is to use
| a RAG approach. But RAG approach has pros and cons and
| can miss crucial information. I think context window
| still matters a lot. The bigger the window, the more
| information you can feed in and the quality of answer
| should increase.
|
| The point I'm trying to make is that increase context
| window will require more compute. Hence, we could still
| just be in the beginning of the compute/AI boom.
| reissbaker wrote:
| We might be even earlier -- the 90s was a famous boom
| with a fast bust, but to me this feels closer to the dawn
| of the personal computer in the late 70s and early 80s:
| we can automate things now that were impossible to
| automate before. We might have a long time before seeing
| diminishing returns.
| _huayra_ wrote:
| This is the main "killer feature" I've personally
| experienced from GPT things: a much better contextual
| "search engine-ish" tool for combing through and
| correlating different internal data sources (slack, wiki,
| jira, github branches, etc).
|
| AI code assistants have been a net neutral for me (they get
| enough idioms in C++ slightly incorrect that I have to
| spend a lot of time just reading the generated code
| thoroughly), but being able to say "tell me what the
| timeline for feature X is" and have it comb through a bunch
| of internal docs / tickets / git commit messages, etc, and
| give me a coherent answer with links is amazing.
| aurareturn wrote:
| This is partly why I believe OS makers, Apple, Microsoft,
| Google, have a huge advantage in the future when it comes
| to LLMs.
|
| They control the OS so they can combine and feed all your
| digital information to an LLM in a seamless way. However,
| in the very long term, I think their advantage will go
| away because at some point, LLMs could get so good that
| you don't need an OS like iOS anymore. An LLM could
| simply become standalone - and function without a
| traditional OS.
|
| Therefore, I think the advantage for iOS, Android,
| Windows will increase in the next few years, but less
| powerful after that.
| thwarted wrote:
| An LLM is an application that runs on an operating system
| like any other application. That the vendor of the
| operating system has tied it to the operating system is
| purely a marketing/force-it-onto-your-device/force-it-in-
| front-of-your-face play. It's forced bundling, just like
| Microsoft did with Internet Explorer 20 years ago.
| aurareturn wrote:
| I predict that OpenAI will try to circumvent iOS and
| Android by making their own device. I think it will be
| similar to Rabbit R1, but not a scam, and a lot more
| capable.
|
| They recently hired Jony Ive on a project - it could be
| this.
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| >they get enough idioms in C++ slightly incorrect
|
| this is part of why I stay in python when doing ai-
| assisted programming; there's so much training
| information out there for python and I _generally_ don't
| care about if its slightly off-idiom, its still probably
| fine.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| My workpalce uses Glean and since it was connected to Slack
| it has become significantly worse. It routinely gives
| incorrect or VERY incomplete information, misattributes
| work to developers who may have casually mentioned a
| project at some time and worst of all presents jokes or
| sarcastic responses as fact.
|
| Not only is it an extremely poor source of information, it
| has ruined the company's Slack culture as people are no
| longer willing to (for lack of a better term) shitpost
| knowing that their goofy sarcasm will now be presented to
| Glean users as fact.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| > the more compute you have, the smarter and more capable AI
|
| Well, this is taken on faith by OpenAI/etc, but obviously the
| curve has to flatten at some point, and appears to already be
| doing so. OpenAI are now experimenting with scaling
| inference-time compute (GPT-O1), but have said that it takes
| exponential increases in compute to produce linear gains in
| performance, so it remains to be seen if customers find this
| a worthwhile value.
| aurareturn wrote:
| GPT-o1 does demonstrate my point: the more compute you
| have, the smarter the AI.
|
| If you run chain of thoughts on an 8B model, it becomes a
| lot smarter too.
|
| GPT-o1 isn't GPT5 though. I think OpenAI will have a chain
| of thoughts model for GPT5-class models as well. They're
| separate from normal models.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| There is only so much that an approach like O1 can do,
| but anyways in terms of AI boom/bust the relevant
| question is whether this is a viable product. All sorts
| of consumer products could be improved by making them a
| lot more expensive, but there are cost/benefit limits to
| everything.
|
| GPT-5 and Claude-4 will be interesting, assuming these
| are both pure transformer models (not COT), as they will
| be a measure how much benefit remains to be had from
| training set scaling. I'd expect gains will be more
| against narrow benchmarks, than in the overall feel of
| intelligence (LLM arena score?) one gets from the model.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| > One gauge I use to determine if we are still at the
| beginning of the boom is this
|
| Has your barber/hairdresser recommended you buy NVDA?
| arach wrote:
| There was an NVDA earnings watch party in NY this summer
| and Jensen signed some boobs earlier this year. There are
| some signs but still room to run
| tim333 wrote:
| You can never really tell, though following some market tea
| leaf readers they seem to think a few months from now, after
| a bit of a run up in the market. Here's one random datapoint,
| on mentions of "soft landing" in Bloomberg
| https://x.com/bravosresearch/status/1848047330794385494
| aurareturn wrote:
| I read through a few pages of tweets from this author and
| it looks just like another perpetual doomsday pundit akin
| to Zerohedge.
| tim333 wrote:
| Well yeah there may be a bit of that. I find them quite
| interesting for the data they bring up like the linked
| tweet but I don't really have an opinion as to whether
| they are any good at predicting things.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Similarly, I like to compare AI (more specifially LLM)
| "investment" to the cost of building the channel tunnel between
| UK and France. The original investors lost their shirt, but
| once built it is profitable to operate.
| tim333 wrote:
| I was an original investor. I still have shirts and shares in
| it but they could have done better.
| ben_w wrote:
| > but now that renewables are the cheapest form of energy, I
| believe this huge, well-funded demand will accelerate the
| growth of non-carbon energy sources
|
| I think the renewables would have been built at the same rate
| anyway precisely because they're so cheap; but nuclear power,
| being expensive, would not be built if this bubble had not
| happened, and somehow nuclear does seem to be getting some of
| this money.
| atomic128 wrote:
| I want to point out to anyone who's interested in the nuclear
| angle that even before the AI data center demand story
| arrived, the uranium market was facing a persistent
| undersupply for the first time in its many decades of
| history. As a result, the (long-term contract) price of
| uranium has been steadily rising for years:
| https://www.cameco.com/invest/markets/uranium-price
|
| After Fukushima
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41768726), Japanese
| reactors were shut down and there was a glut of uranium
| available in the spot market. Simultaneously, Kazatomprom
| flooded the market with cheap ISR uranium. The price of
| uranium fell far below the cost of production and the mining
| companies were obliterated. The few miners that survived via
| their long-term contracts (primarily Cameco) put their less
| efficient mines into care and maintenance.
|
| Now we're seeing the uranium mining business wake up. But
| after a decade of bear-market conditions the miners cannot
| serve the demand: they've underinvested, they've lost skilled
| labor, they've shrunk. The rebound in uranium supply will be
| slow, much slower than the rebound in demand. This is because
| uranium mining is an extremely difficult process. Look at how
| long NexGen Energy's Rook 1 Arrow mine has taken to develop,
| and that's prime ore (https://s28.q4cdn.com/891672792/files/d
| oc_downloads/2022/03/...). Look at Kazatomprom's slowing
| growth rate (https://world-nuclear-
| news.org/Articles/Kazatomprom-lowers-2...), look at the
| incredible complexity of Cameco's mining operations:
| https://www.petersenproducts.com/articles/an-inflatable-
| tunn...
|
| Here is a discussion of the uranium mining situtation:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41661768 (including a
| very risky method of profiting from the undersupply of
| uranium, stock ticker SRUUF, not recommended). Note that
| Numerco's uranium spot price was put behind a paywall last
| week. You can still get the intra-day spot uranium price for
| free here: https://www.yellowcakeplc.com/
| ben_w wrote:
| Uranium, at least the un-enriched kind you can just buy,
| was never the problem.
|
| Even the peak of that graph (136... er, USD per lb?) is
| essentially a rounding error compared to everything else.
|
| 0.00191 USD/kWh? Something like that, depends on the type
| of reactor it goes in.
| atomic128 wrote:
| You are correct. This is one of the advantages of nuclear
| power.
|
| The fuel is a tiny fraction of the cost of running the
| plant. See discussion here, contrasting with natural gas:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41858892
|
| It is also important that the fuel is physically small so
| you can (and typically, do) store years of fuel on-site
| at the reactor. Nuclear is "secure" in the sense that it
| can provide "energy security".
| synergy20 wrote:
| based on my reading nuclear power is much cheaper overall
| compared to wind solar etc?
| atomic128 wrote:
| Yes, that's right. See the recent discussion here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41860341
|
| Basically, nuclear fission is clean baseload power. Wind
| and solar are not baseload power sources. They don't really
| compete. See discussion here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41858892
|
| Furthermore, we're seeing interest (from Google and Amazon
| and Dow Chemical) in expensive but completely safe TRISO
| (HALEU) reactors (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/triso-
| particles-most-robu...). These companies want clean
| baseload power, with no risk of meltdown, and they're
| willing to pay for it. Here's what Amazon has chosen:
| https://x-energy.com/fuel/triso-x
|
| TRISO (HALEU) reactors use more than 1.5 times the natural
| uranium per unit of energy produced because the higher
| burnup is offset by higher enrichment inputs (see page 11
| at https://fuelcycleoptions.inl.gov/SiteAssets/SitePages/Ho
| me/1...), and the fuel is even more expensive to
| manufacture, but they are completely safe. This is a
| technology from the 1960's but it's attractive now because
| so much money is chasing clean baseload nuclear fission for
| data centers.
|
| These "impossible to melt down" TRISO small modular nuclear
| fission reactors are what Elon Musk was talking about on
| the campaign trail last week, when he said:
| ELON MUSK: "The dangers of nuclear power are greatly
| overstated. You can make a nuclear reactor that is
| literally impossible to melt down even if you tried to
| melt it down. You could try to bomb the place, and it
| still wouldn't melt down. There should be no regulatory
| issues with that. There should be significant nuclear
| reform."
|
| https://x.com/AutismCapital/status/1847452008502219111
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| > _Basically, nuclear fission is clean baseload power.
| Wind and solar are not baseload power sources. They don
| 't really compete._
|
| This means you don't understand how the grid works.
| California's baseload is ~15 GW while it peaks at 50 GW.
|
| New built nuclear power is wholly unsuitable for load
| following duty due to the economics. It is an insane
| prospect when running at 100% 24/7, and even worse when
| it has to adapt.
|
| Both nuclear power and renewables need storage,
| flexibility or other measures to match their
| inflexibility to the grid.
|
| See the recent study where it was found that nuclear
| power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive
| with renewables, due to both options requiring
| dispatchable power to meet the grid load.
|
| > _The study finds that investments in flexibility in the
| electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the
| constant production pattern of nuclear and the
| variability of renewable energy sources. However, the
| scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion
| EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only
| based on renewables, with all systems completely
| balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in
| every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with
| renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR /MW must be
| achieved, which is substantially below any cost
| projection for nuclear power._
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626
| 192...
|
| > These companies want clean baseload power, with no risk
| of meltdown, and they're willing to pay for it. Here's
| what Amazon has chosen
|
| The recent announcements from the hyperscalers are PPAs.
| If the company building the reactor can provide power at
| the agreed price they will take it off their hands. Thus
| creating a more stable financial environment to get
| funding.
|
| They are not investing anything on their own. For a
| recent example NuScale another SMR developer essentially
| collapsed when their Utah deal fell through when nice
| renders and PowerPoints met real world costs and
| deadlines.
|
| https://iceberg-research.com/2023/10/19/nuscale-power-
| smr-a-...
|
| > with no risk of meltdown
|
| Then we should be able to remove the enormous subsidy the
| Price Anderson act adds to the industry right? Let all
| new reactors buy insurance for a Fukushima level accident
| in the open market.
|
| Nuclear powerplants are currently insured for ~0.05% of
| the cost of a Fukushima style accident and pooled
| together the entire US industry covers less than 5%.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nucl
| ear...
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Not at all. Old paid of nuclear plants are competitive but
| new builds are insanely expensive leading to $140-220/MWh
| prices for the ratepayers before factoring in grid
| stability and transmission costs.[1]
|
| The US has zero commercial reactors under construction and
| this is for one reason: economics.
|
| The recent announcements from the hyperscalers are PPAs. If
| the company building the reactor can provide power at the
| agreed price they will take it off their hands. Thus
| creating a more stable financial environment to get
| funding.
|
| They are not investing anything on their own. For a recent
| example NuScale another SMR developer essentially collapsed
| when their Utah deal fell through when nice renders and
| PowerPoints met real world costs and deadlines. [2]
|
| [1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/gjyffoqd/lazards-
| lcoeplus-june-...
|
| [2]: https://iceberg-research.com/2023/10/19/nuscale-power-
| smr-a-...
| floren wrote:
| > leading to $140-220/MWh prices for the ratepayers
|
| I'm on PG&E, I _wish_ I could get my electricity for only
| $0.14 /kWh
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| That cost is excluding grid stability and transmission
| costs.
|
| From what I've understood PG&E's largest problem is the
| massive payouts and infrastructure upgrades needed from
| the wildfires, not the cost of the electricity itself.
| from-nibly wrote:
| The problem is that all that mal investment will get bailed
| about by us regular shmucks. Get ready for the hamster wheel to
| start spinning faster.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Not all of that infrastructure gets soaked up, plenty is
| abandoned. Look at the state of american passenger rail for
| example and how quickly the bottom of that industry dropped
| out. Many old rail right of ways sit abandoned today. Likewise
| with telecoms, e.g. the microwave network that also sits
| abandoned today.
| jacobgorm wrote:
| Railroads and computer networks create network effects, I am
| not sure the same is true for data centers full of hardware
| that becomes outdated very quickly.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| If they're building new power plants to support all those
| data centers than that power generation capacity might be put
| to good use doing something else.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Something people forget is that a training cluster with tens of
| thousands of GPUs is a general purpose supercomputer also! They
| can be used for all sorts of numerical modelling codes, not
| just AI. Protein folding, topology optimisation, route
| planning, satellite image processing, etc...
|
| We bought a lot of shovels. Even if we don't find more gold, we
| can dig holes for industry elsewhere.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I can't wait for the AI bubble to be over so HN can talk about
| something else
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| I will take AI bubble over crypto bubble any day of the week.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > I will take AI bubble over crypto bubble any day of the
| week.
|
| I've been in the former since '21 and have seen every single
| cycle since 2011 in the latter, I can assure their is more
| dumb money in the former than in the latter; (just by scale
| alone) at least in the latter whether it was ICO or NFTs or
| whatever mal-investment was promptly punished (rugpulls/exit
| scams) companies like INTEL get to stay in Zombie mode
| because of the corpo-welfare that the US doles out while
| shaming everyone else to be prudent with their investments
| while these corps and banks spend like drunken sailors and
| tries to strangle the former out of existence (rightly so in
| most cases as most crypto is a total scam).
|
| With that said, what you will see emerge are some incredibly
| established players in both fields that will have the staying
| power to change how the Industry is shaped around them:
| Nvidia and Bitcoin are comparable to one another in that
| respect.
|
| Both have/had crazy volatility but the staying power and just
| the fact they remain firmly at the center of both Industry's
| is rather telling that you simply don't see what these
| technologies offer because of the hype and boom and bust
| cycles.
|
| As a person who directly benefits from this: I can assure you
| most of these VCs are exit liquidity just as most foolish
| people are for the alt scams of yore, execpt the US economy
| (likely all of the Western World at this point) isn't
| entirely reliant on the promise of vapourware with 'crypto'
| in any capacity, weheras the same cannot be said about the
| theatrics of Jensen's Nvidia.
|
| Source: I build data center infrastructure for these mega
| corps doing 'AI' and I'm doing an MSc in CS (Big Data) and
| been a Bitcoiner since Satoshi was still on BTF.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| You might be right, but the crypto people were/are
| basically religious in their responses. I see a few loons
| for LLM's talking about how AGI is near, and of course
| there's the EA/LessWrong people talking about doomsday. But
| none of them were as staunchly dug in _and_ misinformed as
| the crypto folks.
|
| edit: if it isn't clear I'm a staunch opponent of
| cryptocurrency in any form.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > edit: if it isn't clear I'm a staunch opponent of
| cryptocurrency in any form.
|
| It's very clear, but your exposure to zealots, on both
| sides, shouldn't deter you from being objective and
| seeing what these technologies actually offer. Hence why
| i wrote that part in the 2nd to last paragraph.
|
| HN has such misinfored vitriol for any technology it
| didn't ordain itself, you sem to be of that cohort,
| what's odd is that very same people who gave you VC.SV
| funded startup land are all major backers of this
| technology.
|
| I can just summarize this in one phrase: you seem to
| collectively not know, what you don't know and make leaps
| in logic and misinformed judgments from that POV.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| I have little interest in the ycombinator legacy of
| hustle culture, growth hacking, get-millions-for-
| glorified-todo-app, etc. As far as I can tell it is
| effectively the underlying reason for why crypto and AI
| get hyped up to the point where we can't have reasonable
| discussions about them in forums.
|
| I'm just here because it happens to be where like-minded
| people (_sometimes_) hang out.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > I have little interest in the ycombinator legacy of
| hustle culture, growth hacking, get-millions-for-
| glorified-todo-app, etc. As far as I can tell it is
| effectively the underlying reason for why crypto and AI
| get hyped up to the point where we can't have reasonable
| discussions about them in forums.
|
| Ohh, well... I'm guilty of drinking that kool-aid,
| unfortunately and was a boot-strapping fintech founder
| with the battle scars to show--those scars appear in this
| discussion thus far by the way.
|
| But I get it, I'm trying to be amicable about this as
| much as I can, especially fbecause I know no one can deny
| us anymore in the BTC side at this point, and in the AI
| side... well, money-hype boom and AI-doomer pr0n cycles
| aside we are actually building amazing amounts of compute
| that hopefully can yield amazing results, something like
| Starship recovery system levels of advancement in many
| other Industries/Sectors one day, probably very far off
| in the future but that's the start, right?
|
| Every forest starts with a sappling kind of a thing, and
| these two technologies emerged from a time when I was in
| my formidable development period so I saw them as
| something more than just the marketing side--AI is
| marketing, ML is really just stats with code to back it
| up after all. Bitcoin is just a FOSS network using token
| based cryptographic key encryption.
|
| Stop using throwaways if you want real conversations, it
| might help you have those conversations you're looking
| for. :)
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| zifpanachr23 said:
|
| > AI people sound more dug in to be honest from my
| perspective. But I guess that's cause the crypto stuff
| tends to be less overtly religious and more overtly
| batshit crazy politics and economics, which I'm much more
| used to dealing with haha. And mostly, everyone has
| figured out the scam by now on the crypto side.
|
| >>The AI people freak me out cause they are all talking
| eschatology and shit as if they have stumbled upon the
| literal ark of the covenant like in raiders of the lost
| ark or something.
|
| >>>It's a really great act to be honest. They've been
| clearly studying a lot of the more dishonest American
| religious culture of the last couple of decades.
|
| I'm going to commit a HN faux pas to prove a point and
| show you why I think Bitcoin has a valid use case here
| alone: I decided to repost what he said because there are
| valid points here and are worth discussing.
|
| Had I the inclination I can hash this into the blockchain
| for all to see what was written from this poster for the
| aforementioned reasons for as long as the mainchain
| continues to be maintained, protected and supported .
|
| This has great utility, and the mere suggestion that you
| cannot get over that is because those 'crazies offend me
| and my disposition' and stop there you fail to see why
| and what this technology can already do--create an actual
| immutable archive of all Human history if we desire it.
|
| But to his point, yes it's roots in Crypto-Anarchism
| (which started in CA at the inception of the rise of
| modern SV btw) has many of you questioning the ''sanity'
| and 'motives' behind this technology, and you assume they
| are all the same but rest assure their is a reason for
| the brain drain from all of tech/STEM/finance during my
| era and time in Bitcoin.
|
| Most of whom are now incredibly wealthier than they ever
| were working in academia or private industry if you think
| money is a measure of one's success--I don't, but most of
| you do.
|
| The AI people strike me more as a range of the
| introduction corpos from banking and academia into
| bitcoin (Gavin's, Hearn) to total con men like Veer and
| sprinkled in there are the cult memebers you mentioned
| who honestly think that their techno-utopian trans-
| humanist dreams are being built one LLM update at a time.
| It's sad... it's the same thing just different
| names/faces.
| dangerwill wrote:
| No one cares that blockchains are immutable, that doesn't
| mean that information written there is correct. Just that
| it was written on X date and the content. You could find
| proof of the biggest scandal of all time and post it on
| the blockchain so "the man" can't stop the word from
| getting out but 99.99999999% of readers would read a
| version presented by a simple web server and with the
| value cached in a closed database or memory. Which if the
| government wants to take down, it can. And if that does
| go down, no one will save a link to the entry on the
| blockchain. And on the flip side I could write obvious
| falsehoods in the same way. Blockchain provides no value
| for legal attestation nor information distribution.
|
| In practice, the vast majority of blockchain ledgers
| record the history of scams, penny stock style trading
| and money laundering attempts.
| dangerwill wrote:
| Yes, I agree wholeheartedly and I actively dislike the
| concept of LLMs for anything real. But nothing will be worse
| than the flood of outright scams or attempts at rent
| seeking/middle man creation that crypto was. At least LLMs
| have some potential use cases (and line level auto complete
| is genuinely better now because of LLMs)
| bugbuddy wrote:
| I think it will burst when the Fed realizes inflation is not
| done and start raising again in 6 months. They can only feed
| the bubble for so long before the common people have had enough
| of rising prices.
| almost_usual wrote:
| The Fed raising rates will increase inflation at this point
| (and further increase fiscal deficits), nothing stops that
| train.
|
| Arguably if the investment here works out we'll see deflation
| through extreme technical advancements.
| bugbuddy wrote:
| No, raising rate would bring the economy to a slower pace
| and reduce private sector consumer demand. Private sector
| investment can continue to increase but at some point that
| too will hit a brick wall. The public sector spending
| depends on which type of big ego people get to make
| decisions. Given the extreme excesses so far it can go
| either way. The now extinct fiscal conservatives might just
| make a return finally but don't hold your breath.
| almost_usual wrote:
| Raising rates works in the beginning with high fiscal
| deficit driven inflation by slowing demand and bank
| lending.
|
| But raising interest rates and keeping them high in an
| environment where runaway government deficits and high
| government debts are causing inflation runs the risk of
| exacerbating inflation.
|
| You have high interest rates on a large amount of
| government debt which continues to push _more_ money into
| the economy.
|
| The Fed doesn't have any real options at this point but
| to lower rates.
| bugbuddy wrote:
| Public sector demand is a much smaller percentage of the
| overall economy. If raising rates did not slow the
| economy due to high government deficit spending, then we
| would certainly be living in a much different world of
| command economy with the government running everything.
| That's not yet the world we live in.
|
| Another possibility is that the rate is still not high
| enough and needs to be raised much much higher to stop
| inflation. I think rates need to be in the 6 to 7 percent
| to really stop inflation. The is just a pause. It will
| come back like a vengeance.
| bubbleRefuge wrote:
| Ask Argentina about that. They started finally reducing
| rates and its working some.
| bubbleRefuge wrote:
| Wow! Rare to see someone get it. MMT follower ? Would add
| that the money printing is being distributed
| proportionaly to the wealthy under a Deomcrat regime.
| Pretty sad.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> keeping them high_
|
| At some point we need to address the elephant in the room
| and ask people specifically what they mean by "high"
| rates, because 5% isn't particularly high by historical
| terms, it's only high for people who never paid attention
| to interest rates before 2010.
| nineteen999 wrote:
| You can always join the Wordpress tantrum discussions if you're
| getting fatigued, that ones really jumping around here lately.
| kevindamm wrote:
| I'm designing an extension of datalog instead.
| j_timberlake wrote:
| People are going to be talking about AI for the rest of your
| life, but feel free to go join an Amish community or live in
| the woods, maybe get a job as a Firewatch.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Question:It seems like the requirements needed to become an
| investor in a startup is a multimillion pool of money...which is
| not what a salaried professional has at their disposal. Yet, a
| lot of the 100x opportunities come before public offerings,
| making a whole class of investment unavailable to modest but
| knowledgeable professionals. I know that sometimes, through
| personal connections, pools of investment money are built across
| individuals, but as a public service it seems like, no, it is
| not.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| I remember listening to Dr Robert Martin who was leading Bell
| Labs in the late 90s and he talked about how the bandwidth
| capacity was pushing to infinity while cost per bit was pushing
| towards zero and we all know how that ended for the optical
| capacity builders of that time before the bubble popped. Is there
| a case for intelligence being inexhaustible to demand ? Is there
| a case for, as Sama says, the cost for intelligence as in input
| to a system converges with the price of electricity needed to
| power the gpu behind it in the daya center? Yes and yes. Still
| the same could be said for a bit of bandwidth.
| dangerwill wrote:
| Generated text =! Intelligence.
| torginus wrote:
| I am very skeptical of the positive effects of infite
| intelligence on the living standards of knowledge workes.
|
| On the more pessimistic end, AI will replace us and we'll be
| sent to the coal mines.
|
| On the possibly most optimistic end, living standards are a
| composite of many things rooted in reality, so I'd say the
| actual cap is about doubling of life quality, which is not
| nothing, but not unprecendented if we look at the past century
| and a half.
| joshdavham wrote:
| I'm curious how this will affect cloud costs for the rest of us.
| On the one hand, we may get some economies of scale, but on the
| other hand, cloud resources being used up by others may drive
| prices up. Does anyone have any guesses as to what will happen?
| aurareturn wrote:
| I doubt it will increase cost for traditional CPU-based clouds.
| Just take a look at Ampere 192 core and AMD 196 core CPUs.
| Their efficiency will continue to drive down traditional cloud
| $/perf.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| I've yet to find an "AI" that doesn't seamlessly hallucinate, and
| I don't see how "AIs" that hallucinate will ever be useful
| outside niche applications.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I believe that there is lot of content creation where quality
| really does not matter. And hallucinations don't really matter.
| Unless they are legally actionable, that is something like hate
| speech or libel.
|
| Throwing dozens of articles, social media posts and why not
| even videos. Hallucinations really don't matter at scale. And
| enough content is already generating enough views to make it
| somewhat viable strategy.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Humans also confabulate (a better metaphor for AI errors than
| hallucination) when called on to respond without access to the
| ground truth, and most AI models have limited combination of
| access and ability to use that access when it comes to checking
| ground truth.
| edanm wrote:
| You don't really need to imagine this though - generative AI is
| _already_ extremely useful in many non-nice applications.
| zone411 wrote:
| Confabulations are decreasing with newer models. I tested
| confabulations based on provided documents (relevant for RAG)
| here: https://github.com/lechmazur/confabulations/. Note the
| significant difference between GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-4o.
| sean_pedersen wrote:
| https://github.com/stanford-oval/WikiChat
| openrisk wrote:
| There is an interesting contrast between the phenomenal
| investment boom versus functionally zero job growth...
|
| > Even the software publishers and computing infrastructure
| industries at the forefront of this AI boom have seen
| functionally zero net employment growth over the last year - the
| dismal job market that has beleaguered recent computer science
| graduates simply has not improved much.
|
| ... which may explain, in broad brush, the polarised HN attitude:
| bitter cynics on one side and aggresive zealots on the other.
| m101 wrote:
| There is a comment on this thread about this being like the
| railroads, but this is nothing like the railroads except insofar
| as it costs a lot of money.
|
| The railroads have lasted decades and will remain relevant for
| many more decades. They slowly wear out, and they are the most
| efficient form of land transport.
|
| These hardware investments will all be written off in 6 years
| time and won't be worth running given the power costs and
| relative output. They will be junked.
|
| There's also the extra risk that for some reason future AI
| systems just don't run efficiently on current gen hardware.
| tim333 wrote:
| Some stuff like the buildings and power supplies will probably
| remain good. But year, probably new chips in a short while.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-10-20 23:00 UTC)