[HN Gopher] The AI bust is here
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The AI bust is here
Author : CrankyBear
Score : 23 points
Date : 2025-01-29 18:19 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.computerworld.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.computerworld.com)
| nis0s wrote:
| It would be well-deserved and helpful towards culling many AI
| services, which are essentially snake oil. For example, the
| science and research on lie detection using image and audio
| analysis is tenuous at best, but there companies purporting to
| offer services such as these. On the other hand, such services
| are perhaps useful for milking money and resources from
| unscrupulous actors whose primary goal is "cover your ass". So,
| essentially the McKinsey business model.
| gradientsrneat wrote:
| Open source and/or low precision LLMs have been around for years
| and people have been hacking on them and doing all sorts of
| things with them. AI is incredibly overhyped and was due for
| commoditization. If a Chinese company releasing yet another
| decent but somehow this time incredibly overhyped LLM is what it
| takes to get investors to see the writing on the wall, then good
| riddance.
| casey2 wrote:
| The fact that o3 exists moots any point that relies on AI
| becoming cheap. When/if deepseek
|
| At most this will force OpenAI to hire some real engineers and
| not just new grads who are easy to exploit.
| mlboss wrote:
| OpenAI pays close to a million per year. Anybody can be
| exploited at that salary.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| "Pays"
|
| Are those PPUs vesting and is there a cash market for them?
| honestSysAdmin wrote:
| I do consulting for multiple GPU hosting companies. DeepSeek
| means more things can be done with less and the demand for access
| to GPU has only increased.
|
| The analysts, analysts who do not code, analysts who don't run
| GPU clouds, are wrong.
|
| The anals are wrong.
| prettyblocks wrote:
| This is my intuition as well. DeepSeek and the proliferation of
| local LLMs have showed us just how much can be done with
| relatively light hardware. It finally has me wanting to build a
| rig for local use when before I felt like the technology wasn't
| quite there for me to do anything too useful with some consumer
| hardware. This changed over night. I imagine there are many
| folks like me.
| honestSysAdmin wrote:
| There's also lot you can do with not-brand-new server
| hardware that doesn't cost that much. The hard part is a
| location to put it where the noise is not bothersome. Though
| many who are "upper middle class" or on low-cost private land
| can manage to make this happen. I have seen people that don't
| have a lot of money, rather young people, do a lot on private
| land. Small dedicated server buildings are a thing.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Or, we just end up in a Kowloon Walled City cyberpunk
| hellscape with water cooling pipes and fans running though
| all our environment.
| mv4 wrote:
| This may not affect the total demand, but the distribution of
| demand. What's also affected, in my opinion:
|
| - individual company valuations
|
| - capacity planning models ("what would it take to do x?") and
| related funding
|
| - overall competitive landscape (yes you can compete with OpenAI
| after all without a trillion dollars in funding)
|
| - it's not the coveted high-end GPUs anymore, more
| affordable/available hardware may also work
| suraci wrote:
| I think a big difference between dotcom bubble and ai bubble is:
|
| where is the business/how it profit?
|
| there're solid new-born business with dotcom, like amazon and
| microsoft
|
| but who are the customers of AI(or LLM, to be specific)? for now
| i can only see limited user such as programers
|
| how will business gain profits by LLMs
|
| and it feels like users are already consumed totally by existing
| internet and apps, it's a stock market rather than an incremental
| market
|
| This is not like a gold mine and shovels, it's more like a cliff
| and ropes
| mlboss wrote:
| SEO, Marketing, Content Generation(Text,Images,Videos) has
| completely changed by AI. Lot of new companies are getting
| created in this space. Automation via computer use is the new
| set of application I am seeing in the market.
|
| It is very easy now to analyze what is happening in a computer
| screen and make rule based application on what to do next. Lot
| of jobs will be disrupted by it.
| lukev wrote:
| SEO, marketing, and content generation are fundamentally
| parasitic bullshit. Unlike the initial .com wave, there is
| value to some companies, but basically no value to end
| consumers or (ultimately) humanity.
| redeux wrote:
| You would probably say the same thing about Amazon when it was
| founded in 1994. Personally, I don't agree with the article if
| for no other reason than we're too early in the cycle to know
| the outcomes. I also don't think cheaper models will sink the
| AI market because really models are just infrastructure. It's
| what you build on top of the models that's useful. For example,
| ChatGPT is actually an agent built on top of models.
| gizajob wrote:
| One obvious business case is customer service chatbots, which
| all of a sudden do seem to have got loads better, ie, they work
| for the first time and can at least interact and understand
| what your problem is (before passing you on to a human) which
| has been 30 years coming.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| For anyone who doesn't realise how similar this is to the dotcom
| bubble, here is a thought experiment.
|
| In 1998, you would have spent 2 years hearing about Altavista and
| the new search engine paradigm with curated hyperlinks. They are
| buying lots and lots of Cisco gear to serve their network. You
| get excited and invest $100B into Altavista and Cisco.
|
| Then all of a sudden, a startup called Google shows up with a
| cheaper and more efficient way of presenting search, with much
| less networking equipment.
|
| What do you think happens to the $100B invested with Altavista
| and Cisco? What do you think happens to OpenAI and Nvidia?
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| I just made a very similar analogy to someone yesterday (we
| work at Google).
|
| Open source stacks and commodity hardware win. What do you
| think the next generation of engineers and scientists is
| training on right now, as broke students? They aren't paying
| licenses and big API credits.
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