[HN Gopher] After the AI boom: what might we be left with?
___________________________________________________________________
After the AI boom: what might we be left with?
Author : imasl42
Score : 84 points
Date : 2025-10-12 19:40 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.robbowley.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.robbowley.net)
| arisAlexis wrote:
| The singularity. I don't think most authors of articles like
| these understand what the AI build up is about, they think it's
| another fad tool.
| mjhay wrote:
| You might want to listen to what people besides Sam Altman and
| Ray Kurweil say, at least once in a while.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| We've had AI booms before. In terms of capabilities, this one
| is following exactly the same trajectory. Human researchers
| come up with some sort of breakthrough improvement to AI
| methods, that results in exponential like growth of capability
| as we both solve the low hanging fruit the method offers at it,
| and scale up the compute and data available to the limits of
| what is useful for the method. Then, capabilities start to
| plateau, and there is a long tail of the new techniques being
| applied in specific situations as they get combined with domain
| specific tuning and architecture.
|
| We are well into this process already. Core chat capabilities
| have pretty much stalled out. But most of the attempts at
| application are still very thin layers over chat bots.
| abathologist wrote:
| Indeed, the critics can only be so critical because they are
| not convinced of the revealed truth that we are materializing
| machine god. How irrational.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I'm hoping that it's sarcasm to be invoking a machine god
| while calling the non-believers irrational.
| dinobones wrote:
| GPUs still won't be cheap
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| What will be the next thing eating all GPUs, after crypto and
| now AI?
| tobias3 wrote:
| The autonomous drones fighting in the next war (let's hope
| not...).
| WalterSear wrote:
| IMHO, it _will_ be autonomous robotics - one way or
| another.
| willis936 wrote:
| I can't tell you the name, but it will be another scam all
| the same.
| mikert89 wrote:
| I cant believe people still arent grasping the profound
| implications of computers that can talk and make decisions.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| How do we make money on it, especially if massive amounts of
| the population lose their jobs?
| mikert89 wrote:
| dude again, we have computers that can talk and make
| decisions. We have birthed something here. We have something,
| this is big.
| mjhay wrote:
| Even by HN standards, this is just an incredible comment.
| You'd think it's satire, but I doubt it.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| One of the reasons I like to swing by HN on the weekend
| is that the flavor of the comments is a lot spicier. For
| better or worse.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Is that a thing now?
| noir_lord wrote:
| Has been for a while, the difference isn't huge but it
| does seem to be a difference.
|
| Slightly different cohorts.
| mikert89 wrote:
| ive been on HN for about 15 years :)
| mikert89 wrote:
| see i was thinking my comments didnt go far enough in
| describing what we are witnessing
| skywhopper wrote:
| The last thing we need is a bunch of random chatter, but
| that's all these things can do. They can't make decisions
| because they don't actually relate to the real world.
| Humans (like you, apparently) may think a talking computer
| is a magic oracle but you're fooling yourself.
| dgacmu wrote:
| I had a computer that could talk and make decisions in
| 1982. It sounded pretty robotic and the decisions were
| 1982-level AI: Lots of if statements.
|
| I'm not really trying to be snarky; I'm trying to point out
| to you that you're being really vague. And that when you
| actually get really, really concrete about what we have it
| ... starts to seem a little less magical than saying
| "computers that talk and think". Computers that are really
| quite good at sampling from a distribution of high-
| likelihood next language tokens based upon complex and long
| context window is still a pretty incredible thing, but it
| seems a little less likely to put us all out of a job in
| the next 10 years.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >I had a computer that could talk and make decisions in
| 1982.
|
| And it became and industry that as completely and totally
| changed the world. The world was just so analog back
| then.
|
| >starts to seem a little less magical than saying
| "computers that talk and think"
|
| Computer thinking will never become magical. As soon as
| we figure something out it becomes "oh that is just X".
| It is human thinking that will become less magical over
| time.
| crote wrote:
| The "talking and making decisions" part didn't change the
| world, though. It was the digital spreadsheets and
| letters that did.
| dcminter wrote:
| Define "make decisions" such that an 'if' statement does
| not qualify but an llm does.
|
| LLMs may be a stepping stone to AGI. It's impressive tech.
| But nobody's proven anything like that yet, and you're
| running on pure faith not facts here.
| mikert89 wrote:
| i mean, if given the choice between using a coding agent
| like the codex ui, or a CS intern, I would take the
| coding agent every time. to me its self evident whats
| going on
| dcminter wrote:
| Well frankly your lack of concrete arguments makes it
| seem a lot like _you_ don 't actually understand what's
| going on here.
|
| I'm enjoying the new LLM based tooling a lot, but nothing
| about it suggests that we're _in any way_ near to AGI
| because it 's very much a one trick pony so far.
|
| When we see generative AI that updates its weights in
| real time (currently an intractible problem) as part of
| the feedback loop then things might get very interesting.
| Until then it's just another tool in the box. CS interns
| learn.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I get a new batch of CS interns for my team every year,
| and I use Claude Code every day. I think Claude is pretty
| amazing and it definitely provides value for me, but I
| would choose the intern every time. I am really skeptical
| of any claims of getting the kind of productivity and
| capability growth out of an LLM that would make it an
| adequate replacement for a human developer.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| You should post something more substantial than this.
| mikert89 wrote:
| its a problem of imagination, "situational awareness".
| People are simply not aware of what we have discovered,
| their minds cannot see beyond a chatbox. thats not even
| to mention the smoothness of the loss functions the big
| ai labs are seeing, the smooth progression of the scaling
| laws. its all there, it progresses daily
| falcor84 wrote:
| You know the quote "it is easier to imagine an end to the
| world than an end to capitalism"? Well, AI has allowed me to
| start imagining the end of capitalism. I'm not claiming we're
| necessarily very close, but I can clearly see the way from
| here to a post-scarcity society.
| Peritract wrote:
| How do you square that with all current AI development
| being _intensely_ capitalistic?
| pixl97 wrote:
| All kinds of things commit suicide, intentional and
| unintentional.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > I can clearly see the way from here to a post-scarcity
| society.
|
| I would be interested to hear the way that you see. I don't
| have any problem seeing a huge number of roadblocks to
| post-scarcity that AI won't solve, but I am open to a
| different perspective.
| gosub100 wrote:
| That's hypothetically possible if a government somehow
| forced corporations to redistribute their wealth. But a
| civil war is equally likely. Where society is destroyed
| after poor people with guns have their say.
| b_e_n_t_o_n wrote:
| What are they?
| mikert89 wrote:
| how could i even begin to list them, is the point of my
| original comment
| dcminter wrote:
| If they're that profound you should be able to come up with
| _one_ example though, right?
|
| Not that I think you're wrong, but come on - make the case!
|
| I have the very unoriginal view that - yes, it's a (huge)
| bubble but also, just like the dot com bubble, the
| tevhnology _is_ a big deal - but it 's not obvious to see
| what will stand and fall in the aftermath.
|
| Remember that Sun Microsystems, a very established pre-dot
| com business, rose to huge heights on the bubble and was
| then smashed by the fall when it popped. Who's the AI
| bubble's Sun and who's its Amazon? Place your bets...
| b_e_n_t_o_n wrote:
| Hahahaha right
| lgas wrote:
| Just pick one then, since so far you've conveyed nothing at
| all about them, so we're all left to wonder what you might
| be thinking of.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| You can have a bubble, and still have profound impact from AI.
| See also the dotcom boom.
| mikert89 wrote:
| who cares about a bubble? we are on the cusp of intelligent
| machines. The implications will last for hundreds of years,
| maybe impact the trajectory of humanity
| mjr00 wrote:
| > we are on the cusp of intelligent machines.
|
| Nah, we aren't. There's a reason the output of generative
| AI is called slop.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Except we aren't. They aren't thinking, and they can't
| actually make decisions. They generate language. That feels
| magical at first but in the end it's not going to solve
| human problems.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > we are on the cusp of intelligent machines.
|
| Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. We have
| machines that _talk_ , which is corollary to nothing.
| fruitworks wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder if reason is partially a product of
| manipulating language.
| card_zero wrote:
| It's nice that you say _partially,_ that 's bit different
| from every other HN comment that wondered this. Yeah,
| probably partially, as in, you have reason, you add in
| language, you get more reason.
| dcminter wrote:
| > we are on the cusp of intelligent machines
|
| That's an extremely speculative view that has been
| fashionable at several points in the last 50 years.
| squidbeak wrote:
| How often in the last 50 years have those machines done
| what these machines do?
| bigyabai wrote:
| Define "do" in this context. If you mean hardware-
| accelerated matmul, then machines have been doing that
| for half a century.
| dcminter wrote:
| On every occasion you could have made exactly the same
| point.
| tim333 wrote:
| Things like getting gold in the math olympiad and 120 on
| iq tests are kinda cuspy and not been there in 49 of the
| last 50 years.
| Gattopardo wrote:
| My dude, it's literally just fancy autocomplete and isn't
| intelligent at all.
| rusk wrote:
| Clippy with a Bachelors in web search
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| What makes you so sure that you aren't just fancy
| autocomplete?
| alganet wrote:
| I am sure that if I am a fancy auto-complete, I'm way
| fancier than LLMs. A whole different category of fancy
| way above their league. Not just me, but any living human
| is.
| abathologist wrote:
| I am so sure because of the self-evidence of my
| experience, the results of 2 millennia of analysis into
| the nature of cognition and experience, and consideration
| of the material composition of our organism (we obviously
| have lots of critical analog components, which are not
| selecting tokens, but instead connecting with flows from
| other continua).
|
| Prediction is obviously involved in certain forms of
| cognition, but it obviously isn't all there is to the
| kinds of beings we are.
| daytonix wrote:
| brother please
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| Matrix is calling you on the rotary dial phone.
| stanac wrote:
| Is that why we no longer have telephone boots? They want
| to prevent Neo from jumping in and out of Matrix?
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| Oh god, you know it.
| card_zero wrote:
| Telephone ... boots?
|
| _Napkin scribbles_
| maxglute wrote:
| Bubble burst means current technical AI approach economic
| deadend, if the most resourced tech companies in the world
| can't afford to maintain AI improvment then it's probably
| not going to happen because public likely isn't going to
| let state spend $$$$ in lieu of services on sovereign Ai
| projects that will make them unemployed.
| parineum wrote:
| I don't think anyone underestimates that and a lot of people
| can't wait to see it.
| mikert89 wrote:
| anyone mentioning a bubble is underestimating the gravity of
| whats going on
| quesera wrote:
| I'm old enough to have heard this before, once or thrice.
|
| It's always different this time.
|
| More seriously: there are decent arguments that say that
| LLMs have an upper bound of usefulness and that we're not
| necessarily closer to transcending that with a different AI
| technology than we were 10 or 30 years ago.
|
| The LLMs we have, even if they are approaching an upper
| bound, are a big deal. They're very interesting and have
| lots of applications. These applications might be net-
| negative or net-positive, it will probably vary by
| circumstance. But they might not become what you're
| extrapolating them into.
| ff2400t wrote:
| I think you aren't understanding the meaning of the world
| bubble here. No one can deny the impact LLM can have but it
| still has limits. And the term bubble is used here as an
| economic phenomenon. This is for the money that openai is
| planning on spending which they don't have. So much money
| is being l poured here, but most users won't pay the
| outrageous sums of money that will actually be needed for
| these LLM to run, the break even points looks so far off
| that you can't even think about actual profitability. After
| the bubble bursts we will still have all the research done,
| the hardware left and smaller llms for people to use with
| on device stuff.
| mikert89 wrote:
| the real innovation is that neural networks are
| generalized learning machines. LLMs are neural networks
| on human language. The implications of world models +
| LLMs will take them farther
| KPGv2 wrote:
| The neural net was invented in the 1940s, and LLMs were
| created in the 1960s. It's 2025 and we're still using
| 80yo architecture. Call me cynical, but I don't
| understand how we're going to avoid the physical
| limitations of GPUs and data to train AIs on. We've
| pretty much exhausted the latter, and the former is going
| to hit sooner rather than later. We'll be left at that
| point with an approach that hasn't changed much since
| WW2, and our only solution is going to hit a physical
| limit law.
|
| Even in 2002, my CS profs were talking about how GAI was
| a long time off bc we had been trying for decades to
| innovate on neural nets and LLMs and nothing better had
| been created despite some of the smartest people on the
| planet trying.
| mikert89 wrote:
| they didnt have the compute or the data to make use of
| NNs. but theoretically NNs made sense even back then, and
| many people thought they could give rise to intelligent
| machines. they were probably right, and its a shame they
| didnt live to see whats happening right now
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > they didnt have the compute or the data to make use of
| NNs
|
| The compute and data are both limitations of NNs.
|
| We've already gotten really close to the data limit (we
| aren't generating enough useful content as a species and
| the existing stuff has all been slurped up).
|
| Standard laws of physics restrict the compute side, just
| like how we know we will hit it with CPUs. Eventually,
| you just cannot put things closer together that generate
| more heat because they interfere with each other because
| we hit the physical laws re miniaturization.
|
| No, GAI will require new architectures no one has thought
| of in nearly a century.
| mikert89 wrote:
| dude who cares about data and compute limits. those can
| be solved with human ingenuity. the ambiguity of creating
| a generalized learning algorithm has been solved. a
| digital god has been summoned
| muldvarp wrote:
| The internet was world changing and the dotcom bubble was
| still a bubble.
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| The self checkout machines at the supermarket can talk and make
| decisions. I don't see them revolutionising the world.
| mikert89 wrote:
| think bigger, because this certainly is. change on the order
| of years means nothing
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| Sorry, I don't believe in Calvinism.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| 1. That's not remotely the same, and you know it.
|
| 2. The category of computerized machines (of which self
| checkouts are one example) has absolutely revolutionized the
| world. Computerization is the defining technology of the last
| twenty years.
| alganet wrote:
| What is that category and what other machines are in it?
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| > I don't see them revolutionising the world.
|
| They revolutionized supermarkets.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| In what way?
|
| I would really like to hear you explain how they
| _revolutionized_ supermarkets.
|
| I use them every day, and my shopping experience is served
| _far_ better by going to a place that is smaller than one
| that has automated checkout machines. (Smaller means so
| much faster.)
|
| Hell, if you go to Costco, the automated checkout line
| moves slower than the ones manned by experienced workers.
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| Unless you happen to be some sort of rodent that feeds off
| of discarded grains, the supermarket is not the world.
|
| And for small baskets, sure, but it was scan as you shop
| that really changed supermarkets and those things
| thankfully do not talk.
| ogogmad wrote:
| This is the most perfect troll comment I've ever seen. Bravo.
| dcminter wrote:
| I think it's worth engaging with even if this guy's a troll
| (not saying he is) because it's not that freakish a view in
| the real world. What _are_ the arguments to counter this
| kind of blind enthusiasm?
| tim333 wrote:
| It's kind of making a fair point more than trolling.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| From a software development perspective, the more I think of
| it, the more I understand it's just another abstraction layer.
| Before that came high level languages and JVM of sorts, before
| that came the compiler, before that came the assembler.
|
| Outside of the software world it's mostly a (much!) better
| Google.
|
| Between now and a Star Trek world, there's so much to build
| that we can use any help we can get.
| mikert89 wrote:
| yeah we have fuzzy computer interfaces now, instead of "hard
| coded" apis.
| elorant wrote:
| Speech to text and vice versa exists for over a decade. Where's
| the life altering application from that?
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > Speech to text and vice versa exists for over a decade.
|
| Indeed. I was using speech to text three decades ago. Dragon
| Naturally Speaking was released in the 90s.
| lxgr wrote:
| Then you hopefully remember how "natural" it actually was.
| AstroBen wrote:
| ..except they can't
|
| It's blatantly obvious to see if you work with something you
| personally have a lot of expertise in. They're effectively
| advanced search engines. Useful sure.. but they're not anywhere
| close to "making decisions"
| gosub100 wrote:
| An RNG can "make a decision" lol.
| zkmon wrote:
| Maybe you are not grasping the convergence effect of the
| overall socio-political-economic trends that could actually
| label AI output as abhorrent plastic pollution or atleast not a
| high priority for public good.
| paufernandez wrote:
| In my case I fully grasp what such a future could be, but I
| don't think we are on the path to that, I believe people are
| too optimistic, i.e. they just believe instead of being truly
| skeptical.
|
| From where I look at it, LLMs are flawed in many ways, and
| people who see progress as inevitable do not have a mental
| model of the foundation of those systems to be able to
| extrapolate. Also, people do not know any other forms of AI or
| have though hard about this stuff on their own.
|
| The most problematic things are:
|
| 1) LLMs are probabilistic and a continuous function, forced by
| gradient descent. (Just having a "temperature" seems so crazy
| to me.) We need to merge symbolic and discrete forms of AI.
| Hallucinations are the elephant in the room. They should not be
| put under the rug. They should just not be there in the first
| place! If we try to cover them with a layer of varnish, the
| cost will be very large in the long run (it already is: step-
| by-step reasoning, mixture of experts, RAG, etc. are all
| varnish, in my opinion)
|
| 2) Even if generalization seems ok, I think it is still really
| far from where it should be, since humans need exponentially
| less data and generalize to concepts way more abstract than AI
| systems. This is related to HASA and ISA relations. Current AI
| systems do not have any of that. Hierarchy is supposed to be
| the depth of the network, but it is a guess at best.
|
| 3) We are just putting layer upon layer of complexity instead
| of simplifying. It is the victory of the complexifiers and it
| is motivated by the rush to win the race. However, I am not so
| sure that, even if the goal seems so close now, we are going to
| reach it. What are we gonna do? Keep adding another order of
| magnitude of compute on top of the last one to move forward?
| That's the bubble that I see. I think that that is not solving
| AI at all. And I'm almost sure that a much better way of doing
| AI is possible, but we have fallen into a bad attractor just
| because Ilya was very determined.
|
| We need new models, way simpler, symbolic and continuous at the
| same time (i.e. symbolic that simulate continuous), non-
| gradient descent learning (just store stuff like a database),
| HAS-A hierarchies to attend to different levels of structure,
| IS-A taxonomies as a way to generalize deeply, etc, etc, etc.
|
| Even if we make progress by brute forcing it with resources,
| there is so much work to simplify and find new ideas that I
| still don't understand why people are so optimistic.
| mikert89 wrote:
| symbols and concepts are just collections of neurons that
| fire with the correct activation. its all about the bitter
| lesson, human beings cannot design ai, they can only find the
| most general equations, most general loss function, and push
| data in. and thats what we have, and thats why its a big
| deal. The LLM is just a manifestation of a much broader
| discovery, a generalized learning algorithm. it worked on
| language because of the information density, but with more
| compute, we may be able to push in more general sensory
| data...
| pixl97 wrote:
| Symbolic AI is mostly dead, we spend a lot of time and money
| on it and got complex and fragile systems that are far worse
| than LLMs.
| ogogmad wrote:
| Not sure this is a good counterpoint in defence of LLMs, but
| I'm reminded of how Unix people explain why (in their
| experience) data should be encoded, stored and transmitted as
| text instead of something more seemingly natural like binary.
| It's because text provides more ways to read and transform
| it, IN SPITE of its obvious inefficiency. LLMs are the
| ultimate Unix text transformation filter. They are extremely
| flexible out-of-the-box, and friendly towards
| experimentation.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Symbolic AI is _dead_. Either stop trying to dig out and
| reanimate its corpse, or move the goalposts like Gary Marcus
| did - and start saying "LLMs with a Python interpreter beat
| LLMs without, and Python is symbolic, so symbolic AI won,
| GG".
|
| Hallucinations are incredibly fucking overrated as a problem.
| They are a consequence of the LLM in question not having a
| good enough internal model of its own knowledge, which is
| downstream from how they're trained. Plenty of things could
| be done to improve on that - and there is no fundamental
| limitation that would prevent LLMs from matching human
| hallucination rates - which are significantly above zero.
|
| There is a lot of "transformer LLMs are flawed" going around,
| and a lot of alternative architectures being proposed, or
| even trained and demonstrated. But so far? There's nothing
| that would actually outperform transformer LLMs at their
| strengths. Most alternatives are sidegrades at best.
|
| For how "naive" transformer LLMs seem, they sure set a high
| bar.
|
| Saying "I know better" is quite easy. Backing that up is
| really hard.
| rafavento wrote:
| Computers have been able to talk and make decisions from the
| beginning. Maybe you meant mimicking humans?
| mikert89 wrote:
| mimick is quite a loaded word
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Reminds me of crypto/Web-3.0 hype. Lots of bluster about
| changing economic systems, offering people freedom and wealth,
| only to mostly be scams, and coming with too serious inherent
| drawbacks/costs to solve many of the big problems it promises
| to solve.
|
| In the end leaving the world changed, but not as meaningfully
| or positively as promised.
| mikert89 wrote:
| the difference is the impact of crypto was always
| hypothetical, chatgpt can be used, explored, and if you are
| creative enough, levered in ways as the ultimate tool
| dotnet00 wrote:
| You've done nothing but reuse the Sam Altman/Elon Musk
| playbook of making wild and extremely vague statements.
|
| Maybe say something concrete? What's a positive real world
| impact of LLMs where they aren't hideously expensive and
| error prone to the point of near uselessness? Something
| that isn't just the equivalent of a crypto-bro saying that
| their system for semi-regulated speculation (totally not a
| rugpull!) will end the tyranny of the banks.
| ogogmad wrote:
| So you're saying that modern LLMs are a just like
| crypto/Web3, except in all the ways they're not, so they
| must be useless.
|
| ---
|
| Less flippantly, they are excellent for self-studying
| university-level topics. It's like being able to ask
| questions to a personal tutor/professor.
| zirror wrote:
| But you need to verify everything unless it's self
| evident. The number of times CoPilot (Sonnett 4) still
| hallucinates Browser APIs is astonishing. Imaging trying
| to learn something that can't be checked easily, like
| Egyptian archeology or something.
| bluesnowmonkey wrote:
| You have to verify everything from human developers too.
| They hallucinate APIs when they try to write code from
| memory. So we have: - documentation
| - design reviews - type systems - code review
| - unit tests - continuous integration -
| integration testing - Q&A process - etc.
|
| It turns out when include all these processes, teams of
| error-prone human developers can produce complex working
| software. Mostly -- sometimes there are bugs. Kind of a
| lot actually. But we get things done.
|
| Is it not the same with AI? With the right processes you
| can get consistent results from inconsistent tools.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Taking the example of egyptian archeology, if you're
| reading the work of someone who is well regarded as an
| expert in the field, you can trust their word a lot more
| than you can trust the word of an AI, even if the AI is
| provided the text you're reading.
|
| This is a pretty massive difference between the two, and
| your narrative is part of why AI is proving to be so
| harmful for education in general. Delusional dreamers and
| greedy CEOs talking about AI being able to do "PhD level
| work" have potentially ruined a significant chunk of the
| next generation into thinking they are genuinely learning
| from asking AI "a few questions" and taking the answers
| at face value instead of struggling through the material
| to build true understanding.
| lxgr wrote:
| The vast majority of people trying to do any given thing
| simply don't have access to experts in the field, though.
|
| I'll take a potential solution I can validate over no
| idea whatsoever of my own any day.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| What are books?
| crote wrote:
| So you would prefer "Yes, the moon is indeed made of
| cheese!" over "I don't know what the moon is made of"?
|
| If _any_ answer is acceptable, just get your local
| toddler to babble some nonsense for you.
| lxgr wrote:
| The trick is to put them in contexts where they can
| validate their purported solutions and then iterate on
| them.
| mikert89 wrote:
| they speak in generalities because the models are
| profoundly general, a general learning system. below
| someone asked me to list the capabilities, its the wrong
| question to ask. its like asking what a baby can do
| throwawa14223 wrote:
| ChatGPT is just as useless as a shitcoin and just like a
| shitcoin the sooner we stop burning electricity on LLMs the
| better.
| tuatoru wrote:
| I have seen AI improve the quality and velocity of my wife's
| policy analysis dramatically.
|
| She doesn't _like_ using Claude, but she accepts the
| necessity of doing so, and it reduces 3-month projects to
| 2-week projects. Claude is an excellent debating partner.
|
| Crypto? Blockchain? No-one sceptical could ever see the point
| of either, unless and until their transaction costs were less
| than that of cash. That... has not happened, to put it
| mildly.
|
| These things are NOT the same.
| Findecanor wrote:
| "The ability to speak does not make you intelligent."
| mikert89 wrote:
| again, only a few years ago, the concept of a real time voice
| conversation with a computer was straight out of science
| fiction
| dcminter wrote:
| This is true. The old original series (and later) Star Trek
| computers being able to interpret normal idiomatic humam
| speech and act upon it was, to those in the know,
| hilariously unrealistic until _very suddenly_ just recently
| it wasn 't. Pretty cool.
| mikert89 wrote:
| pretty much all of the classical ideas of what an ai
| could do, can be done with our existing capabilities. and
| yet, people continue to live as if the world has not
| changed
| dcminter wrote:
| "AI" has been doing that since the 1950s though. The
| problem is that each time we define something and say
| "only an _intelligent_ machine can X " we find out that X
| is woefully inadequate as an example of real
| intelligence. Like hilariously so. e.g. "play chess" -
| seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, but clearly
| 1980s budget chess computers are not "intelligent" in any
| very useful way regardless of how Sci Fi they were in the
| 40s.
|
| So why's it different this time?
| mikert89 wrote:
| yeah im in agreement, ai will eventually do everything a
| human being can
| dcminter wrote:
| Perhaps, but why are you so convinced we're _so close_
| when we weren 't all the other times?
| dcminter wrote:
| "Empty vessels make the loudest noise" as my headmaster used
| to rather pointedly quote to me from time to time.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I can't believe I still have to do my own laundry and dishes.
| Like that's some how way more powerful than the models of a
| megawatt powered data center and millions of dollars in 3nm
| silicon can conquer.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| ... by hand? With water you heated on a wood fire, the ashes
| of which you turned into potash so you can make your own
| soap?
|
| Or did you pop your laundry into a machine and your dishes
| into another one and press a button?
| flyinglizard wrote:
| I admit to only being in this industry for three decades now, and
| only designing and implementing the thermal/power control algo of
| an AI chip family for three years in that time, but it's the
| first time I hear of chips "wearing under high intensity use".
| bsaul wrote:
| thanks for that comment. I know absolutely nothing about chip
| designs, but i too was under the assumption that chips, like
| anything, wear out. And the more you use them, the more they
| do.
|
| Is the wear so small that it's simply negligible ?
| flyinglizard wrote:
| As long as you keep temperatures and currents in check,
| there's no reason for a chip under load to fare worse than an
| idle chip. Eventually, maybe, but not in the 5-10 year
| lifespan expected of semiconductors.
| sam_bristow wrote:
| Wasn't there a phenomenon with the GPUs being retired from
| crypto mining operations being basically cooked after a
| couple of years. Likely because they _weren 't_ keeping
| temperatures in check and just pushing the cards to their
| limits.
| cyberax wrote:
| Chips absolutely do wear out. Dopants electromigrate and higher
| temperatures make it faster. Discrete components like
| capacitors also tend to fail over time.
|
| Is it going to be that significant though? No idea.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Depends on the design, and how hard you push it.
|
| Just ask Intel what happened to 14th gen.
|
| It's not normally an issue, but the edge cases can be very
| sharp. Otherwise, the bigger concern is the hardware becoming
| obsolete because of new generations being significantly more
| power efficient. Over a few years, the power+cooling+location
| bill of a high end CPU running at 90% utilization can cost
| more than the CPU itself.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Honestly it depends on a whole lot. If they are running
| 'very' hot, yea they burn out faster. If they have lots of
| cooling and heating cycles, yea, they wear out faster.
|
| But with that said machines that run at a pretty constant
| thermal load within range of their capacitors can run a very
| long time.
| archerx wrote:
| I believe the next step will be robotics and getting A.I. to
| interact with the physical world at human fidelity.
|
| Maybe we can finally have a Rosie from the Jetsons.
| blibble wrote:
| > Maybe we can finally have a Rosie from the Jetsons.
|
| just what I want, a mobile Alexa that spews ads and spies on me
| 24/7
| trollbridge wrote:
| Robots still haven't come close to replicating human and animal
| touch as a sense, and LLMs don't do anything to help with that.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean, even the human brain is broken up in different parts
| and the parts that do touch are insanely old compared to
| higher thinking. The LLM parts tell the robot parts the plate
| should go to the kitchen.
| scellus wrote:
| He writes as if only datacenters and network equipment remain
| after the AI bubble bursts. Like there won't be any AI models
| anymore, nothing left after the big training runs and trillion-
| dollar R&D, and no inference served.
| Juliate wrote:
| The point is, after the bubble burst, will there be enough
| funds, cash flow and... a viable market, to make these still
| run?
| muldvarp wrote:
| Inference is not that expensive. I'd argue that most models
| are already useful enough that people will pay to run them.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| At $20/month for Claude, I'm satisfied. I'll keep paying
| that for what I get from it, even if it never improves
| again.
| rjh29 wrote:
| Who's going to pay to run those models? They are currently
| running at a huge loss.
| antonvs wrote:
| I run models for coding on my own machines. They're a trivial
| expense compared to what I earn from the work I do.
|
| The "at a loss" scenario comes from (1) training costs and
| (2) companies selling tokens below market to get market
| share. Neither of those imply that people won't _run_ models
| in future. Training new frontier-class models could
| _potentially_ become an issue, but even that seems unlikely
| given what these models are capable of.
| Juliate wrote:
| Ok, running them locally, that's definitely a thing.
|
| But then, without this huge financial and tech bubble
| that's driven by these huge companies:
|
| 1/ will those models evolve, or new models appear, for a
| fraction of the cost of building them today?
|
| 2/ will GPU (or their replacement) also cost a fraction of
| what they cost today, so that they are still integrated in
| end-user processors, so that those model can run
| efficiently?
| azeirah wrote:
| Given the popularity and activity and pace of innovation
| seen on /r/LocalLLaMa, I do think models will keep
| improving. Likely not at the same pace as they are today,
| but those people love tinkering but it's mostly
| enthusiasts with a budget for a fancy setup in a garage,
| independent researchers and smaller businesses doing
| research there.
|
| These people won't sit still and models will keep getting
| better as well as cheaper to run.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| It's unclear if people would pay the price to use them if
| they were not below market.
|
| I have access to quite a few models, and I use them here
| and there. They are sort of useful, sometimes. But I don't
| pay directly for any of them. Honestly, I wouldn't.
| qgin wrote:
| The models get more efficient every year and consumer chips
| get more capable every year. A GPT-5 level model will be on
| every phone running locally in 5 years.
| swarnie wrote:
| Can i sign up for an alterative future please? This one
| sounds horrendous.
| harvey9 wrote:
| I can run quite useful models on my PC. Might not change the
| world but I got a usable transcript of an old foreign
| language TV show and then machine translated to English. It
| is not as good as professional subtitles but i wasn't willing
| to pay the cost of that option.
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| Won't those models gradually become outdated (for anything
| related to events that happen after the model was trained,
| new code languages or framework versions, etc) if no one is
| around to continually re-train them?
| surgical_fire wrote:
| "we will be left with local models that can be sort of
| useful but also sort of sucks" is not really a great
| proposition for the obscene amount of money being invested
| in this.
| quesera wrote:
| Running the models is cheap. That will be worthwhile even if
| the bubble pops hard. Not for _all_ of the silly stuff we do
| today, but for some of it.
|
| Creating new LLMs might be out of reach for all but very
| well-capitalized organizations with clear intentions, and
| governments.
|
| There might be a viable market for SLMs though. Why does my
| model need to know about the Boer wars to generate usable
| code?
| logicchains wrote:
| They're not running at a loss. Training runs at a loss, but
| the models are profitable to serve if you don't need to
| continuously train new models.
| jayd16 wrote:
| But you do or you're missing current events, right?
| dcre wrote:
| Not at all, otherwise models with knowledge cutoffs of
| six months to a year ago (all current SOTA models) would
| be useless. Current information is fed into the model as
| part of the prompt. This is why they use web search.
|
| The main reason they train new models is to make them
| bigger and better using the latest training techniques,
| not to update them with the latest knowledge.
| WalterSear wrote:
| Anthropic said their inference is cash positive. I would be
| very surprised if this isn't the norm.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| I would be surprised if they are being honest.
| squidbeak wrote:
| I'd be more surprised if they didn't know their own
| business costs.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| There's a gazillion use cases for these things in business
| that aren't even beginning to be tapped yet. Demand for
| tokens should be practically unlimited for many years to
| come. Some of those ideas won't be financially viable but a
| lot will.
|
| Consider how much software is out there that can now be
| translated into every (human) language continuously, opening
| up new customers and markets that were previously being
| ignored due to the logistical complexity and cost of hiring
| human translation teams. Inferencing that stuff is a no
| brainer but there's a lot of workflow and integration needed
| first which takes time.
| dcre wrote:
| They are obviously running free users at a loss. Can you
| point to evidence of negative margins on subscriptions and
| enterprise contracts?
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| > Most of the money is being spent on incredibly expensive GPUs
| that have a 1-3 year lifespan due to becoming obsolete quickly
| and wearing out under constant, high-intensity use.
|
| How about chips during the dotcom period? What was their
| lifespan?
| bc569a80a344f9c wrote:
| That's irrelevant because the primary assets left after the
| dotcom bubble was fiber in the ground with a lifetime measure
| in decades.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| The author of the article is comparing past and present. It's
| not irrelevant to the article.
| bc569a80a344f9c wrote:
| The whole point of the article is that the dotcom era
| produced long term assets that stayed valuable for decades
| after the bubble burst, and argues that the AI era is
| producing short term assets that won't be of much use if
| the bubble bursts.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| But the chips of the dotcom era were not long-term
| assets. The author appears to claim that.
| bc569a80a344f9c wrote:
| Where? I scanned the article again. I can't seem to find
| that.
| stanac wrote:
| More or less every high-end hardware becomes obsolete, or in
| other words becomes second class. First difference is that at
| least networking hardware could be used for years,
| compute/storage servers became obsolete faster than networking.
| Second is scale. Google summary says that current investments
| are 17x greater than dot com investments. It may be wrong about
| the number but investments are at least on an order of
| magnitude larger.
|
| Maybe in next decade we will have cheap gaming cloud offerings
| built on repurposed GPUs.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > It may be wrong about the number but investments are at
| least on an order of magnitude larger.
|
| Which is exactly what we expect if technological efficiency
| is increasing over time. Saying we've invested 1000x in
| aluminum plants and research over the first steel plants
| means we've had massive technological growth since then. It's
| probably better that it's actually moving around in an
| economy than just being used to consolidate more industries.
|
| >compute/storage servers became obsolete faster than
| networking
|
| In the 90s extremely rapidly. In the 00s much less rapidly.
| And by the 10's servers and storage especially the solid
| components like boards lasted a decade or more. The reason
| the servers became obsolete in the 90s is much faster units
| came out fast and were much faster, not that the hardware
| died. In the 2010-2020 era I repurposed tons of data center
| hardware to onsite computers for small businesses. I'm
| guessing a whole lot less of that hardware 'went away' then
| you'd expect.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Without moralizing or assuming the worst intentions of oligarchs,
| globalists, evil capitalists, and so on, I still don't understand
| how a consumption based economy continues to fund the build out
| (oil->Saudi Arabia->LPs->OpenAI) when the technology likely
| removes the income of its consumers. Help me understand.
| antonvs wrote:
| Just channeling amoral billionaires here, so don't shoot the
| messenger, but if everything is automated by machines that you
| control, you no longer need to farm humans for capital.
|
| Not saying that's even remotely realistic over the next
| century, but it does seem to be how some of these people think.
| Excessive wealth destroys intelligence, it doesn't enhance it,
| as countless examples show.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| It looks like they're planning on funding it through circular
| purchase agreements and looting the rest of the world.
| coderenegade wrote:
| Nothing in capitalism suggests that consumers have to be human.
| In fact, the whole enshittification trend suggests that
| traditional consumers are less economically relevant than
| they've ever been.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| I hope we'll get back to building things that actually matter --
| solutions that help real people; products that are enjoyable to
| use, and are satisfying to build.
|
| As the noise fades, and with luck, the obsession with slapping
| "AI" on everything will fade with it. Too many hype-driven CEOs
| are chasing anything but substance.
|
| Some AI tools may survive because they're genuinely useful, but I
| worry that most won't be cost-effective without heavy subsidies.
|
| Once the easy money dries up, the real engineers and builders
| will still be here, quietly making things that work.
|
| Altman's plea -- "Come on guys, we just need a few trillion
| more!" -- and that error-riddled AI slide deck will be the meme
| that marks the top of the market.
| novaRom wrote:
| Democracy, personal freedoms, and rule of law are things that
| matter, but I am afraid we cannot get back to them quickly
| without significant efforts. We need first to get back to
| sanity. In authoritarian society AI is a tool of control, do we
| want it to be like that?
| zkmon wrote:
| Also, the eco-system plays the biggest controlling role in the
| bubble and its aftermath. Ecosystem of social, political and
| business developments. Dotcom aftermath still had the wind from
| all the ecosytem trends that brought the dotcom back with bigger
| force. If the post AI hype world still has high priority for
| these talking bots, then maybe it's comparable to dotcom. If the
| world has other bigger basic issues that need attention, then
| yes, it could become a pile of silent silicon.
| maxglute wrote:
| AI chips and bespoke data centers are closer to tulips than rail
| or fiber in terms of deprecated assets. They're not fungible
| stranded assets with long shelf life or room for improvment.
| Bubble bursting also points to current model towards AI is
| inherently not economically viable, i.e. we'll still be
| inferencing off existing models but won't be pouring 100billions
| into improving them. TLDR much more all or nothing gambit than
| past infra booms.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| > GPUs that have a 1-3 year lifespan
|
| In 10 years GPUs will have a lifespan for 5-7 years. The rate of
| improvement on this front has been slowing down faster then CPU.
| enord wrote:
| Wait... are you betting on exponential or logarithmic returns?
| stanac wrote:
| There was a video on YT (gamers nexus I think) and an excel
| sheet comparing jumps in performance gains between each new
| nvidia generation. They are becoming smaller and smaller,
| probably now driven by AI boom where most of the silicon is
| used for data centers. Regardless of that, I have a feeling we
| are approaching the ceiling of chip performance. Just comparing
| PS3 and PS4 and then PS4 with PS5, performance jump is smaller
| and size of the hardware has become enormous and GPUs are more
| and more power hungry. If generational jumps were good enough
| we wouldn't need more power and cooling and big boxes for
| desktop PCs that can hold long graphic cards.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| We also have hit ceilings of performance demand. As an
| example, 8K TVs never really got off the ground because your
| average consumer could give a hoot. Vision Pro is a flop
| because AR/VR are super niche. Crypto is more gambling than
| asset class. Etc.
|
| What is interesting is that it seems like the ever larger
| sums of money sloshing around are resulting in bigger, faster
| hype cycles. We are already seeing some companies face issues
| after blowback from adopting AI too fast.
| nemomarx wrote:
| After heavy use, though? I don't think they mean aging out of
| being cutting edge but actually starting to fail sooner after
| being used in DCs.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| They're mostly solid state parts. The parts that do wear out
| like fans are easily replaced by hobbyists.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I swear during the earlier waves of bitcoin mining (before
| good ASICs came out) people ran them overclocked and did
| cause damage. Used GPUs were pretty unreliable for a while
| there.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| 1. Miners were clocking them beyond the factory approved
| speeds - something not needed for AI, where the
| bottleneck is usually VRAM, not clock speed.
|
| 2. While comprehensive studies were never done, some tech
| channels did some testing and found used GPUs to be
| generally reliable or easily repairable, when scamming
| was excluded. https://youtu.be/UFytB3bb1P8
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| This is not correct. Solid-state parts wear out like
| mechanical parts, especially when you run them hot. The
| mechanism of this wear-out comes from things like
| electromigration of materials and high-energy electrons
| literally knocking atoms out of place.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| Those parts take decades to wear out, excepting a
| manufacturing defect.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| That is not correct when wires are small and you run
| things hot. The physics of <10 nm transistor channels is
| very different than it is for 100 nm+ transistors.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| Your assertions are at odds with modern computers -
| including Nvidia datacenter GPUs - still working fine
| after many, many years. If not for 1. improved power
| efficiency on new models and 2. Nvidia'a warranty
| coverage expiring, datacenters could continue running
| those GPUs for a long time.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Which GPUs have been running for decades that you're
| referring to? The A100s that are 4 years old? MTBFs for
| GPUs are about 5-10 years, and that's not about fans. AWS
| and the other clouds have a 5-8 year depreciation
| calendar for computers. That is not "decades."
|
| You can keep a server running for 10-15 years, but
| usually you do that only when the server is in a good
| environment and has had a light load.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| > Which GPUs have been running for decades that you're
| referring to? The A100s that are 4 years old? MTBFs for
| GPUs are about 5-10 years, and that's not about fans.
|
| I said solid state components last decades. 10nm
| transistors have a thing for over 10 years now and other
| than manufacturer defect don't show any signs of wearing
| out from age.
|
| > MTBFs for GPUs are about 5-10 years, and that's not
| about fans.
|
| That sounds about the right time for a repaste.
|
| > AWS and the other clouds have a 5-8 year depreciation
| calendar for computers.
|
| Because the manufacturer warranties run out after that +
| it becomes cost efficient to upgrade to lower power
| technology. Not because the chips are physically broken.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The full quote is:
|
| > Most of the money is being spent on incredibly expensive GPUs
| that have a 1-3 year lifespan due to becoming obsolete quickly
| and wearing out under constant, high-intensity use.
|
| So it isn't entirely tied to the rate of obsolescence, these
| things apparently get worn down from the workloads.
|
| In terms of performance improvement, it is slightly
| complicated, right? It turns out that it was possible to do ML
| training on existing GPGPU. Then there was spurt of improvement
| as they go after the low-hanging fruit for that application...
|
| If we're talking about what we might be left with after the
| bubble pops, the rate of obsolescence doesn't seem that
| relevant anyway. The chips as they are after the pop will be
| usable for the next thing or not, it is hard to guess.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| The failure rate of GPUs in professional datacenter
| environments is over estimated by the general public because
| of the large number of overlocked and undercooled cards used
| for GPU mining that hit eBay.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| What's the strategy when one does die? It's just left in
| place until it's worth it to pull the entire rack?
| lossolo wrote:
| I'm still waiting to get a used Nvidia A100 80 GB (released in
| 2020) for well under $10,000.
| laluser wrote:
| The reason for not keeping them too much longer than a few
| years is that at the end of that timespan you can purchase GPUs
| with > 2x performance, but for the same amount of power. At
| some point, even though the fleet has been depreciated, they
| become too expensive to operate vs. what is on the market.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| There's some telephone game being played here.
|
| The three year number was a surprisingly low figure sourced to
| some anonymous Google engineer. Most people were assuming at
| least 5 years and maybe more. BUT, Google then went on record
| to deny that the three year figure was accurate. They could
| have just ignored it, so it seems likely that three years is
| too low.
|
| Now I read 1-3 years? Where did one year come from?
|
| GPU lifespan is I suspect also affected by whether it's used
| for training or inference. Inference loads can be made very
| smooth and don't experience the kind of massive power drops and
| spikes that training can generate.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| > Where did one year come from?
|
| Perhaps the author confused "new GPU comes out" with "old GPU
| is obsolete and needs replacement"
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| This is where we're headed:
| https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...
| jdalgetty wrote:
| Yikes
| Havoc wrote:
| Pretty wild read. Thinking similar - for better or worse this
| is a full send, at least for the US centric part of the world.
| bubblelicious wrote:
| Great take! Certainly resonates with me a lot
|
| - this is war path funding
|
| - this is geopolitics; and it's arguably a rational and
| responsible play
|
| - we should expect to see more nationalization
|
| - whatever is at the other end of this seems like it will be
| extreme
|
| And, the only way out is through
| Belphemur wrote:
| Quite an interesting read Basically saying we're in war time
| economy with a race to super intelligence. Whichever super
| power does it first has won the game.
|
| Seeing the last tariffs and what China done about the rare
| earth minerals (and also the deal the US made with Ukraine for
| said minerals), the article might have a point that the super
| power will cripple each other to be the first with the super
| intelligence. And you also need money for it so tariffs.
| verzali wrote:
| It says the people running the US right now think that is the
| game we are playing - it doesn't say it is the one we
| actually are playing. America is utterly fucked if they are
| wrong, and only a bit less so if they are right.
| zerof1l wrote:
| Very US-centric article. Written by insecure people who are
| clinging to power and money desperately.
|
| I don't see how some kind of big breakthrough is going to
| happen with the current model designs. The superintelligence,
| if it will ever be created, will require a new breakthrough in
| model architecture. We've pretty much hit the limit of what is
| possible with current LLMs. The improvements are marginal at
| this point.
|
| Secondly, hypothetically, the US achieves superintelligence,
| what is stopping China from doing the same in a month or two,
| for example?
|
| Even if China achieves a big breakthrough first, it may benefit
| the rest of the world.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| It's a US/China centered article, because that's the game,
| Europe is not a meaningful player and everyone else is going
| to get sucked into orbit of one of the superpowers.
|
| If you read the article carefully, I work hard to keep my
| priors and the priors of the people in question separate, as
| their actions may be rational under their priors, but
| irrational under other priors, and I feel it's worth
| understanding that nuance.
|
| I'm curious where you got the writer "clinging to power and
| money desperately."
|
| Also, to be fair, I envy Europe right now, but we can't take
| that path.
| mrbungie wrote:
| > If you think I'm being hyperbolic calling out a future of
| brutal serfdom. Keep in mind we basically have widespread
| serfdom now; a big chunk of Americans are in debt and living
| paycheck to paycheck. The only thing keeping it from being
| official is the lack of debtor's prison. Think about how much
| worse things will be with 10% inflation, 25% unemployment and
| the highest income inequality in history. This is fertile
| ground for a revolution, and historically the elites would have
| taken a step back to try and make the game seem less rigged as
| a self-preservation tactic, but this time is different. As far
| as I can tell, the tech oligarchs don't care because they're
| banking on their private island fortresses and an army of
| terminators to keep the populace in line.
|
| This is suggesting an "end of history" situation. After
| Fukuyama, we know there is no such thing.
|
| I'm not sure if there is a single strong thesis (as this one
| tries to be) on how this will end economically and
| geopolitically. This is hard to predict, much less to bet on.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I'm not proposing and end of history, but things can remain
| in stable equilibrium for longer than you'd expect (just look
| at sharks!). If we slide into stable dystopia now, my guess
| is that there will be a black swan at some point that shakes
| us out of it and continues evolution, but we could still be
| in for 50 years of suffering.
| mrbungie wrote:
| > but we could still be in for 50 years of suffering.
|
| I mean if you are talking about USA itself falling into
| dystopic metastability in such a situation, maybe, but even
| so I think it misses some nuance. I don't see every other
| country following USA into oblivion, and also I don't see
| the USA bending the knee to techno-kings and in the process
| giving up real influence for some bet on total influence.
|
| The only mechanism I see for reaching complete stability
| (or at least metastability) in that situation is idiocracy
| / idiotic authoritarianism, i.e. Trump/his minions actually
| grabbing power for decades and/or complete corruption of
| USA institutions.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| That's basically my maximum likelihood scenario.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| That's on my list, but not my maximum likelihood.
|
| My maximum is that the courts restrain Trump enough that
| we still have at least the shell of a democracy after
| he's gone. But he blazed the trail, and in 20 or 30 years
| someone will walk it better, having done a better job of
| neutralizing or politicizing or perhaps deligitimizing
| the courts first. Then it's game over.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Comparing to China is tricky because Chinese investment is
| almost by default bubbley in the sense of misallocating
| capital. That's what heavily state-directed economies tend to
| do and China's still a communist country. Especially they tend
| to over-invest in industrial capacity. China's massively
| overbuilt electricity grid and HSR network would be easily
| identified as a bubble if it were in the west, but when it's
| state officials making the investment decisions we tend to not
| think of it as a bubble (partly because there's often never a
| moment at which sanity reasserts itself).
|
| I read an article today in which western business leaders went
| to China and were wowed by "dark factories" where everything is
| 100% automated. Lots of photos of factories full of humanoid
| robots too. Mentioned only further down the article: that
| happens because the Chinese government has started massively
| distorting the economy in favor of automation projects. It's
| widely known that one of the hardest parts of planning a
| factory is figuring out what to automate and what to use human
| labour for. Over-automating can be expensive as you lose
| agility and especially if you have access to cheap labour the
| costs and opportunity costs of automation can end up not worth
| it. It's a tricky balance that requires a lot of expertise and
| experience. But obviously if the government just flat out
| reimburses you 1/5th of your spending on industrial robots,
| suddenly it can make sense to automate stuff that maybe in
| reality should not have been automated.
|
| BTW I'm not sure the Kuppy figures are correct. There's a lot
| of hidden assumptions about lifespan of the equipment and how
| valuable inferencing on smaller/older models will be over time
| that are difficult to know today.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| All fair points, and it's hard to know exactly how robust the
| Chinese system will turn out to be, however I would argue
| that their bets are paying off overall, so even if there is
| some capital misallocation, overall their hit rate in
| important areas has been good, while we've been dumping
| capital in "Uber for X, AirBnB for X, ..."
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Well, their bets haven't been paying off, Chinese
| government is in huge amounts of debt due to a massive real
| estate bubble, and lots of subsidies that don't pay back.
| It's a systematic problem, for instance their HSR lines are
| losing a ton of money too.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Amtrak/comments/1hnvl3d/chinese_hs
| r...
|
| https://merics.org/en/report/beyond-overcapacity-chinese-
| sty...
|
| It's easy to think of Uber/AirBnB style apps as
| trivialities, but this is the mistake communist countries
| always make. They struggle to properly invest in consumer
| goods because only heavy industry is legible to the
| planners. China has had too low domestic spending for a
| long time. USSR had the same issue, way too many steel
| mills and nowhere near enough quality of life stuff for
| ordinary people. It killed them in the end; Yeltsin's
| loyalty to communist ideology famously collapsed when he
| mounted a surprise visit to an American supermarket on a
| diplomatic mission to NASA. The wealth and variety of goods
| on sale crushed him and he was in tears on the flight home.
| A few years later he would end up president of Russia
| leading it out of communist times.
| grafmax wrote:
| Im not convinced the geopolitical rivalry between US and China
| is a given. To a large degree it's been manufactured - Friday's
| antics a case in point.
|
| The US indeed seems destined to fall behind due to decades of
| economic mismanagement under neoliberalism while China's public
| investment has proved to be the wise choice. Yet this fact
| wounds the pride of many in the US, particularly its leaders,
| so it now lashes out in a way that hastens its decline.
|
| The AI supremacy bet proposed is nuts. Prior to every societal
| transition the seeds of that transition were already present.
| We can see that already with AI: social media echo chambers,
| polarization, invading one's own cities, oligarchy, mass
| surveillance.
|
| So I think the author's other proposed scenario is right - mass
| serfdom. The solution to that isn't magical thinking but
| building mass solidarity. If you look at history and our
| present circumstances, our best bet to restore sanity to our
| society is mass strikes.
|
| I think we are going to get there one way or another.
| Unfortunately things are probably going to have to get a lot
| more painful before enough people wake up to what we need to
| do.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I think prior to Trump, Europe could have been mediator to a
| benevolent China. Now the hawks are ascendant in Beijing.
| Trump has shown that his ego pushes him to escalate to try
| and show others who the "big man" is, this will not end well
| with China, and I'm not sure he's wise enough to accept that.
|
| Do you really prefer brutal serfdom to the AI supremacy
| scenario? From where I sit, people have mixed (trending
| positive) feelings about AI, and hard negative feelings about
| being in debt and living paycheck to paycheck. I'd like to
| understand your position here more.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Well we could still vote out the corrupt and actually invest in
| US infrastructure but I guess that's crazier than hanging all
| our hopes on AI serfdom.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| This is true, the government is not completely captured yet,
| 2026 is our last chance, but it has to be decisive, or even
| crushing.
| bpt3 wrote:
| > brutal serfdom
|
| You can't seriously believe that spending all your income each
| month while living in the country with the highest standard of
| living in history is "serfdom."
|
| Hyperbolic nonsense like this makes the rest of the article
| hard to take seriously, not that I agree with most of it
| anyway.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Take a look at the way people in a large part of the US are
| living. Paycheck to paycheck not because they're idiots that
| likes to consume, but because shit is expensive and wages
| haven't kept up with productivity for like 50 years.
|
| People are suffering, agree with the rest of what I say or
| not, but I can't let you slide on that.
| pizzly wrote:
| What about the 'openness' of AI development. When I say
| 'openness' of AI I mean in research papers, spying, former
| employees, etc. Wouldn't that mean that after a few months to
| years after AGI is discovered that the other country would also
| discover AGI due to benefiting from the obtaining the knowledge
| from the other side? Similar to how the Soviets did their first
| nuclear test less than 5 years after US did theirs due to a
| large part in spying. The point here is wouldn't the country
| that spends less in AI development actually have an advantage
| over the country that does as they will obtain that knowledge
| quickly for less money? Also the time of discovery of AGI may
| be less important than the country that first implements the
| benefit of AGI.
| alganet wrote:
| One key difference in all of this is that people were not
| predicting the dotcom bubble, so there was a surplus left after
| it popped. It was a surprise.
|
| This AI bubble already has lots of people with their forks and
| knifes waiting to capitalize on a myriad of possible surpluses
| after the burst. There's speculation on top of _the next bubble_
| and how it will form, even before this one pops.
|
| That is absolutely disgusting, by the way.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > of _the next bubble_ and how it will form
|
| This is how humans have worked with pretty much every area of
| expansion in at least the last 500 years and probably longer.
| It's especially noticeable now because the amount of excess
| capital in the world from technological expansion makes it very
| noticeable and a lot of the limitations we know of in physics
| have been ran into, so further work gets very expensive.
|
| If you want to stop the bubbles you have to pretty much end
| capitalism, if which capitalists will fight you about. If AI
| replaces human thinking and robots human labor that 'solves'
| the human capital problem but opens up a whole new field of
| dangerous new ones.
| alganet wrote:
| No, that's not how capitalism works. Debt is not the same
| thing as a speculation bubble.
| rz2k wrote:
| Local/open-weight models are already incredibly competent. Right
| now a Mac Studio with 256GB can be found for less than $5000, and
| an equivalent workstation will likely be 50% cheaper in a year.
| If anything that price is _higher_ because of the boom, rather
| than subsidized by a potential bubble. It can run a 8bit quant of
| GPT-OSS 120B, or 4bit quant of GLM-4.6 using only an extra
| 100-200W. That energy use comes out to about 100 Joules or 1 /4
| Wh per query and response, and is already competitive with the
| power efficiency of even Google's offerings.
|
| I think that people doing work in many professions with these
| offline tools alone could more than double their productivity
| compared to their productivity two years ago. Furthermore if the
| usage was shared in order to lower idle time, such as 20 machines
| for 100 workers, the initial capital outlay is even lower.
|
| Perhaps investors will not see the returns they expect, but it is
| difficult to image how even the current state of AI doesn't
| vastly change the economy. There _could_ be significant business
| failures among cloud providers and attempts to rapidly increase
| the cost of admission to closed models, but there 's essentially
| no possibility of productivity regressing to a pre-AI levels.
| tyleo wrote:
| I have an M4 MBP and I also think Apple is set up quite nicely
| to take real advantage of local models.
|
| They already work on the most expensive Apple hardware. I
| expect that price to come down in the next few years.
|
| It's really just the UX that's bad but that's solvable.
|
| Apple isn't having to pay for each users power and use either.
| They sell hardware once and folks pay with their own
| electricity to run it.
| hiq wrote:
| Your comment made me realize that there's also the benefit of
| not having to handle the hardware depreciation, it's pushed
| to the customer. And now Apple has renewed arguments to sell
| better machines more often ("you had ChatGPT 3-like
| performance locally last year, now you can get ChatGPT 4-like
| performance if you buy the new model").
|
| I know folks who still use some old Apple laptops, maybe 5+
| years old, since they don't see the point in changing (and
| indeed if you don't work in IT and don't play video games or
| other power-demanding jobs, I'm not sure it's worth it).
| Having new models with some performant local LLM built-in
| might change this for the average user.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| The AI "bubble" won't burst just like the "internet bubble"
| didn't burst.
|
| the dotcom bubble was a result of investors jumping on the hype
| train all at once and then getting off of it all at once.
|
| Yes, investors will eventually find another hype train to jump
| on, but unlike 2000, we have tons of more retail investors and AI
| is also not a brand new tech sector, it's built upon the existing
| well established and "too big to fail" internet/ecommerce
| infrastructure. Random companies slapping AI on things will fail
| but all the real AI use cases will only expand and require more
| and more resources.
|
| OpenAI alone just hit 800M MAU. That will easily double in a few
| years. There will be adjustments,corrections and adaptations of
| course but the value and wealth it generates is very real.
|
| I'm no seer, I can't predict the future but I don't see a massive
| popping of some unified AI bubble anytime soon.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| People don't have the grasp of just how insane that "800M MAU
| and still growing" figure is. CEOs would kill people with their
| own bare hands to get this kind of userbase.
|
| OpenAI has ~4B of revenue already, and they aren't even
| monetizing aggressively. Facebook has an infinite money glitch,
| and can afford to put billions in the ground in pursuit of
| moonshots and Zuck's own vanity projects. Google is Google, and
| xAI is Elon Musk. The most vulnerable frontier lab is probably
| Anthropic, and Anthropic is still backed by Amazon and,
| counterintuitively, also Google.
|
| At the same time: there is a glut of questionable AI startups,
| extreme failure rate is likely - but they aren't the bulk of
| the market, not by a long shot. The bulk of the "AI money" is
| concentrated at either the frontier labs themselves, or
| companies providing equipment and services to them.
|
| The only way I see for the "bubble to pop" is for multiple
| frontier labs to get fucked at the same time, and I just don't
| see that happening as it is.
| hiq wrote:
| [delayed]
| dcminter wrote:
| The dot com crash was a thing though. The bubble burst. It's
| just that there was real value there so some of the companies
| survived and prospered.
|
| Figuring out which was which was absolutely not possible at the
| time. Not many people foresaw Sun Microsystems as being a
| victim and nor was it obvious that Amazon would be a victor.
|
| I wouldn't bet my life savings on OpenAI.
| andy99 wrote:
| Cell phones have been through how many generations between the
| 80s and now? All the past generations are obsolete, but the
| investment in improving the technology (which is really a
| continuation of WWII era RF engineering) means we have readily
| available low cost miniature comms equipment. It doesn't matter
| that the capex on individual phones was wasted.
|
| Same for GPUs/LLMs? At some point things will mature and we'll be
| left with plentiful, cheap, high end LLM access, on the back of
| the investment that has been made. Whether or not it's running on
| legacy GPUs, like some 90s fiber still carries traffic, is
| meaningless. It's what the investment unlocks.
| crote wrote:
| > At some point things will mature and we'll be left with
| plentiful, cheap, high end LLM access, on the back of the
| investment that has been made.
|
| Okay, and? What if the demand for LLMs plummets because people
| get disillusioned due to the failure to solve issues like
| hallucinations? If nobody is willing to buy, who cares how
| cheap it gets?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| LLMs are less of a miraculous new world than the hype machine
| says they are, but they are not nothing. They have some
| actual uses. It will fulfill those uses. There will be _some_
| people who still buy.
| dcre wrote:
| The idea that people will suddenly decide LLMs are useless
| after two years of exponential growth in usage is a fantasy.
| tuatoru wrote:
| AI as normal technology take.
|
| 1. https://www.normaltech.ai/p/ai-as-normal-technology
| Havoc wrote:
| The demand for tokens isn't going anywhere, so the hardware will
| be used.
|
| ...whether it is profitable is another matter
| deadbabe wrote:
| I think we will enter a neo-Luddite era at some point post-AI
| boom where it suddenly becomes fashionable to live one's life
| with simple retro style technology, and social networks and much
| of the internet will just become places for bitter old people to
| complain amongst themselves and share stupid memes. Social media
| was cool when it was more genuine, but it got increasingly fake,
| and now with AI it could reach peak-fake. If people want genuine,
| what is more genuine than the real world?
|
| It will become cool for you to become inaccessible, unreachable,
| no one knowing your location or what you're doing. People might
| carry around little beeper type devices that bounce small pre-
| defined messages around on encrypted radio mesh networks to say
| stuff like "I'm okay" or "I love you", and that's it. Maybe they
| are used for contactless payments as well.
|
| People won't really bother searching the web anymore they'll just
| ask AI to pull up whatever information they need.
|
| The question is, with social media on the decline, with the
| internet no longer used for recreational purposes, what else are
| people going to do? Feels like the consumer tech sector will
| shrink dramatically, meaning that most tech written will be made
| to create "hard value" instead of soft. Think anything having to
| do with movement of data and matter, or money.
|
| Much of the tech world and government plans are built on the
| assumption that people will just continue using tech to its
| maximum utility, even when it is clearly bad for them, but what
| if that simply weren't the case? Then a lot of things fall apart.
| firefoxd wrote:
| I wrote a similar article (not published yet), but my conclusion
| was "Free GPUs for everyone" or at least cheap ones. Right now
| H100 are very specialized for the AI pipeline, but so were GPUs
| before the AI boom. I expect we will find good use for them.
| pizzly wrote:
| If there is a downturn in AI use due to a bubble then the
| countries that have built up their energy infrastructure using
| renewal energy and nuclear (both have decade long returns after
| the initial investment) will have cheaper electricity which will
| lead to a future competitive advantage. Gas powered power plants
| on the other hand require constant gas to convert to electricity.
| The price of gas would become the price of electricity regardless
| and thus very little advantage.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-12 23:00 UTC)