47 ms·

The AI Investment Boom

278 points by m-hodges 2y ago

wslh 2y ago
I wonder what lessons the current hardware-intensive AI boom could learn from the history of proof-of-work (PoW) mining, particularly regarding energy consumption, hardware specialization, and market dynamics.
apwell23 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  Well I have the exact opposite experience. I don't know why people struggle to get good results with llms.
  - thuuuomas 2y ago
    Would you feel comfortable pushing generated code to production unaudited?
    - bongodongobob 2y ago
      Would you feel comfortable pushing human code to production unaudited?
      - candiddevmike 2y ago
        Only on Fridays before a three day weekend.
      - dijksterhuis 2y ago
        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 2y ago
        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.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        Nope. But AI's sales pitch is that it's an oracle to lean on. Which is part of the problem. As a start, let me know when an AI can fail test cases, re-iterate on its code to correct the test case, and re-submit. But I suppose that starts to approach AGI territory.
    - charrondev 2y ago
      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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
      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.
  - amonith 2y ago
    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?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - Viliam1234 2y ago
      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 2y ago
      I mean, let me just throw in an example here: I am currently working on https://guesspage.github.io https://guesspage.github.io , which is basically https://getguesstimate.com 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.
  - threeseed 2y ago
    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.
    - dankwizard 2y ago
      "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." If you're doing something in a way it's not in the training data set, maybe your way of approaching the problem is wrong?
      - threeseed 2y ago
        Sorry but some of us aren't building the ten millionth CRUD app. SuccessFactors is a popular HR platform and I was asking it any question and getting the wrong answer every time.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        >If you're doing something in a way it's not in the training data set in my industry, the "training data set" won't get much farther from public code than the barebones, generated doxygen comments we call "documentation". But in a way you're also right. The industry's approach is fundamentally wrong, making 20 solutions to a problem with plenty of room to standardize a proper approach (plenty of room where you need proprietary techniques, but that's getting less true by the month). But an LLM isn't going to fix that cultural issue and will suffer from it.
        warkdarrior 2y ago
        > The industry's approach is fundamentally wrong, making 20 solutions to a problem with plenty of room to standardize a proper approach [...]. But an LLM isn't going to fix that cultural issue and will suffer from it. LLM-powered development may push the industry towards standardization. "Oh, CoPilot cannot generate proper code for your SDK/API/service? Sorry, all my developers use CoPilot, so we will not integrate with your SDK/API/service until you provide better, CoPilot-friendly docs and examples."
- sksxihve 2y ago
  Because they all use AI to write the articles.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    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__ 2y ago
    AI trained on a web that's primarily about selling things
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    I wish they used AI. It'd feel less artificial than the scripts investors give them to keep the boom booming. It's a gold rush and they are inspectors. They have an incentive to keep the rush flowing.
- bugbuddy 2y ago
  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.
  - csomar 2y ago
    They have massively nerfed Copilot. I'm keeping my subscription for a couple more months but at this point, it has the same intelligence as the llma3.2 which I can run on my laptop.
- falcor84 2y ago
  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.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - dangerwill 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
      - falcor84 2y ago
        Could you please give an example of what you wanted it to help you with, what you expected and what you got?
- drowsspa 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 https://intouch.family/en
  - anon7725 2y ago
    That’s one of the saddest bits of AI enshittification yet.
    - CaptainFever 2y ago
      Not what enshittification means.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      Most of my complaints with AI are ethical and legal. But damn me if "products" like this doesn't bring out the bits of luddite in me. Not just to the seller but anyone considering to buy this. Everyone's dreams will differ, but I got into tech to make people more efficient, and in turn enable more of the human element and less pencil pushing. Not replace it entirely.
  - 123yawaworht456 2y ago
    holy shit, if that isn't satire... wow, just fucking wow.
  - walterbell 2y ago
    No detail on founding team or investors. Unbounded liability. Compare with real organizations in eldercare: Commercial: https://lotsahelpinghands.com https://lotsahelpinghands.com Non-profit: https://www.caringbridge.org https://www.caringbridge.org
    - badgersnake 2y ago
      They appear to be a brand of a Czech company AI Touch - https://aitouch.cz/ https://aitouch.cz/ I could not find them on TechCrunch
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- osigurdson 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- _delirium 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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-opportunity-tech-report-2024/ https://www.bain.com/insights/ais-trillion-dollar-opportunit... [2] https://www.privatebankerinternational.com/comment/is-ai-software-the-next-big-investment-opportunity/?cf-view https://www.privatebankerinternational.com/comment/is-ai-sof... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_mining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_mining
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
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 2y ago
  What will be the advantage of having a bunch of obsolete hardware? All I see is more e-waste.
  - wslh 2y ago
    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.
shortrounddev2 2y ago
I can't wait for the AI bubble to be over so HN can talk about something else
- throwaway314155 2y ago
  I will take AI bubble over crypto bubble any day of the week.
  - Melting_Harps 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
      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.
SubiculumCode 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Generated text =! Intelligence.
- torginus 2y ago
  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.
  - Eisenstein 2y ago
    The ideal scenario in my mind is that intelligent and benevolent AI takes over running things and then people have to figure out how to make their life meaningful with only leisure time. There is no long-term time scale in which humans running things do not obliterate each other or end up sitting on a planet filled with trash. Either we figure out how to colonize other planets or we hand over the reigns to something that can plan long term and not be irrational. Maybe if we figure out immortality it might work, but with the short life span of a human there is no way to not be short-sited or eventually end up with the wrong person in charge the button.
    - ant6n 2y ago
joshdavham 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
  - joshdavham 2y ago
    > I doubt it will increase cost for traditional CPU-based clouds. Yeah I think you’re right about that. But what about GPU’s? Will they benefit from economies of scale or the opposite?
GolfPopper 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
  - xk_id 2y ago
    It amazes me the level of nihilism needed to talk about this with casual indifference.
  - flashman 2y ago
    > quality really does not matter What an inspiring vision for the future of news and entertainment.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - ehnto 2y ago
    A viable strategy for making money, or providing value to society? I think for some niches, the former can for a brief period precede the latter. But eventually the market catches up and roots out that which lacks actual value. More concretely, I suspect the advertising apparatus is going to increasingly devalue unattributed content online, favouring curated platforms and eventually resembling a more hands on media distribution with human platform relationships (where media == the actual medium of distribution not content). That is already a thing, where for example an instagrammer promoting your product is more valuable than the automated ad-network on instagram itself. At which point, hopefully, automated content and spam loses legitimacy and value as ad-media.
openrisk 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Some stuff like the buildings and power supplies will probably remain good. But year, probably new chips in a short while.
  - jacurtis 2y ago
    Power plants and power infrastructure are probably an example of a positive consequence that comes from this. We have been terrified to whisper the words "nuclear power" for decades now, but the AI boom is likely to put enough demand on the power grid that it forces us to face this reality and make appropriate buildouts. Even if the AI Boom crashes, these power plants will have positive impacts on the country for decades, likely centuries to come. Keeping bountiful power available and likely low-cost.
    - WillyWonkaJr 2y ago
      It is so bizarre that reducing pollution was not a sufficient driver to build more nuclear power, but training AI models is.
      - xvilka 2y ago
        People are absolutely irrational creatures.
        2y ago
andxor 2y ago
I don't take financial advice from HN and it has served me well.
- 3abiton 2y ago
  How do you know if you had have taken some advice, it might have served you better?
  - andxor 2y ago
    Indeed, downvoted advice has done great.
sparcpile 2y ago
The AI bubble will pop in the next year. We are currently in 1998 of the dotcom bubble with another AI winter approaching. LLM and generative AI are this year’s “on the Internet” or “Uber for X” business plans.
- ant6n 2y ago
  Will the AI bubble pop bring down the rest of the startup industry, or allow for more investment in non AI tech. Climate related tech needs more money.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Given the direction of the economy, we'd hit a recession and no one will be investing. So a loss for all tech. I argue we already are in one, but the US election cycle wants to delay that reality until 2025. Though the US did do a pretty big rate cut. I imagine that will at least stall such a bubble burst into 2026 instead.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  The market PE is very high and has been high for a while. Tech and AI are fueling a lot of that. Look what happened to Tesla when the fundamentals started getting a little discouraging. However, I'm not comfortable predicting the "AI bubble" popping next year.
- arminiusreturns 2y ago
  I don't think it will. The economy bubble will be popped post-election (you will know when the Fed starts raising rates again), but CRE (commercial real estate) is likely the catalyst this time. Within CRE, datacenters are the only item in the green in investors eyes, even more now because of the AI boom. I fully expect that class of investor to then dump more money than ever into energy generation and other sectors related to AI in order to escape the planned crash. The biggest variable is if the supranational oligarchs are wanting to use this crash to cause a much more major shift in monetary policy such as CBDCs.
  - 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
EZ-E 2y ago
So there is a boom in terms of investment for future capacity. It could be interesting to see if the demand is following. I suspect there will be over capacity built, resulting some bankruptcies + cheaper compute/ai costs, hopefully allowing the next generation of startups or companies to flourish later on.
PunchTornado 2y ago
if you were to invest in datacenter stocks (AI datacenters builders), what companies would be good options?
AvaSayes 2y ago
[flagged]
- Netherland4TW 2y ago
  Crazy how all of your previous comments have been promoting one app/"tool" after another
_heimdall 2y ago
I'm always surprised when articles and discussions similar to this lead to anything other than the realization of how absurd it is that we have found ourselves investing unimaginable resources into a LLMs while simultaneously claiming that we've ruined the planet and it could be as little as 5 or 6 years from fundamental damage. Eventually we have to either give up on the hopes of what could come from LLMs with enough investment, or give up on very loud but apparently hollow arguments related to the damage we are causing to the planet.
- gchokov 2y ago
  Or maybe, just maybe, now that we have a need for more energy, we can finally come up with more sustainable ways of producing that energy?
  - tempfile 2y ago
    Why would needing more energy make it easier to satisfy the total demand for energy with renewable sources?
    - pilgrim0 2y ago
      I think because settling for less is just not an option, progress at large would be hindered with a pressure for using less energy, even though it’s the right thing, arguably. Hence demand for more energy itself propels progress and innovation.
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        If we're meant to believe climate predictions coming out of the UN and similar, potential innovation spurred by an increase in energy production would slam face first into the wall of climate catastrophe even faster. I'm not even saying I put much faith behind those predictions, but in the context of contradicting climate concerns with tech "innovation" requiring such massive amounts of energy it seems pertinent. We can't have it both ways, either most agree that the climate concerns are baseless or we accept that we collectively would be choosing to destroy the planet faster in the name of progress and innovation. "Progress" itself is such an interesting term. There's no directionality to it, the only meaning is that we aren't standing still. There's nothing baked into progress that would stop us from progressing right off a cliff, I suppose unless we're already off the cliff and progress could change that.

278 points by m-hodges 2y ago

wslh 2y ago

I wonder what lessons the current hardware-intensive AI boom could learn from the history of proof-of-work (PoW) mining, particularly regarding energy consumption, hardware specialization, and market dynamics.

apwell23 2y ago

> 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 2y ago
Well I have the exact opposite experience. I don't know why people struggle to get good results with llms.
- thuuuomas 2y ago
  Would you feel comfortable pushing generated code to production unaudited?
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    Would you feel comfortable pushing human code to production unaudited?
    - candiddevmike 2y ago
      Only on Fridays before a three day weekend.
    - dijksterhuis 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      Nope. But AI's sales pitch is that it's an oracle to lean on. Which is part of the problem. As a start, let me know when an AI can fail test cases, re-iterate on its code to correct the test case, and re-submit. But I suppose that starts to approach AGI territory.
  - charrondev 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
    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.
- amonith 2y ago
  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?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Viliam1234 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    I mean, let me just throw in an example here: I am currently working on https://guesspage.github.io https://guesspage.github.io , which is basically https://getguesstimate.com 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.
- threeseed 2y ago
  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.
  - dankwizard 2y ago
    "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." If you're doing something in a way it's not in the training data set, maybe your way of approaching the problem is wrong?
    - threeseed 2y ago
      Sorry but some of us aren't building the ten millionth CRUD app. SuccessFactors is a popular HR platform and I was asking it any question and getting the wrong answer every time.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      >If you're doing something in a way it's not in the training data set in my industry, the "training data set" won't get much farther from public code than the barebones, generated doxygen comments we call "documentation". But in a way you're also right. The industry's approach is fundamentally wrong, making 20 solutions to a problem with plenty of room to standardize a proper approach (plenty of room where you need proprietary techniques, but that's getting less true by the month). But an LLM isn't going to fix that cultural issue and will suffer from it.
      - warkdarrior 2y ago
        > The industry's approach is fundamentally wrong, making 20 solutions to a problem with plenty of room to standardize a proper approach [...]. But an LLM isn't going to fix that cultural issue and will suffer from it. LLM-powered development may push the industry towards standardization. "Oh, CoPilot cannot generate proper code for your SDK/API/service? Sorry, all my developers use CoPilot, so we will not integrate with your SDK/API/service until you provide better, CoPilot-friendly docs and examples."
sksxihve 2y ago
Because they all use AI to write the articles.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  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__ 2y ago
  AI trained on a web that's primarily about selling things
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  I wish they used AI. It'd feel less artificial than the scripts investors give them to keep the boom booming. It's a gold rush and they are inspectors. They have an incentive to keep the rush flowing.
bugbuddy 2y ago
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.
- csomar 2y ago
  They have massively nerfed Copilot. I'm keeping my subscription for a couple more months but at this point, it has the same intelligence as the llma3.2 which I can run on my laptop.
falcor84 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dangerwill 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
    - falcor84 2y ago
      Could you please give an example of what you wanted it to help you with, what you expected and what you got?
drowsspa 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 https://intouch.family/en
- anon7725 2y ago
  That’s one of the saddest bits of AI enshittification yet.
  - CaptainFever 2y ago
    Not what enshittification means.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Most of my complaints with AI are ethical and legal. But damn me if "products" like this doesn't bring out the bits of luddite in me. Not just to the seller but anyone considering to buy this. Everyone's dreams will differ, but I got into tech to make people more efficient, and in turn enable more of the human element and less pencil pushing. Not replace it entirely.
- 123yawaworht456 2y ago
  holy shit, if that isn't satire... wow, just fucking wow.
- walterbell 2y ago
  No detail on founding team or investors. Unbounded liability. Compare with real organizations in eldercare: Commercial: https://lotsahelpinghands.com https://lotsahelpinghands.com Non-profit: https://www.caringbridge.org https://www.caringbridge.org
  - badgersnake 2y ago
    They appear to be a brand of a Czech company AI Touch - https://aitouch.cz/ https://aitouch.cz/ I could not find them on TechCrunch
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
osigurdson 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
_delirium 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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-opportunity-tech-report-2024/ https://www.bain.com/insights/ais-trillion-dollar-opportunit... [2] https://www.privatebankerinternational.com/comment/is-ai-software-the-next-big-investment-opportunity/?cf-view https://www.privatebankerinternational.com/comment/is-ai-sof... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_mining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_mining

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

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 2y ago
What will be the advantage of having a bunch of obsolete hardware? All I see is more e-waste.
- wslh 2y ago
  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.

shortrounddev2 2y ago

I can't wait for the AI bubble to be over so HN can talk about something else

throwaway314155 2y ago
I will take AI bubble over crypto bubble any day of the week.
- Melting_Harps 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    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.

SubiculumCode 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
Generated text =! Intelligence.
torginus 2y ago
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.
- Eisenstein 2y ago
  The ideal scenario in my mind is that intelligent and benevolent AI takes over running things and then people have to figure out how to make their life meaningful with only leisure time. There is no long-term time scale in which humans running things do not obliterate each other or end up sitting on a planet filled with trash. Either we figure out how to colonize other planets or we hand over the reigns to something that can plan long term and not be irrational. Maybe if we figure out immortality it might work, but with the short life span of a human there is no way to not be short-sited or eventually end up with the wrong person in charge the button.
  - ant6n 2y ago

joshdavham 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.
- joshdavham 2y ago
  > I doubt it will increase cost for traditional CPU-based clouds. Yeah I think you’re right about that. But what about GPU’s? Will they benefit from economies of scale or the opposite?

GolfPopper 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.
- xk_id 2y ago
  It amazes me the level of nihilism needed to talk about this with casual indifference.
- flashman 2y ago
  > quality really does not matter What an inspiring vision for the future of news and entertainment.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ehnto 2y ago
  A viable strategy for making money, or providing value to society? I think for some niches, the former can for a brief period precede the latter. But eventually the market catches up and roots out that which lacks actual value. More concretely, I suspect the advertising apparatus is going to increasingly devalue unattributed content online, favouring curated platforms and eventually resembling a more hands on media distribution with human platform relationships (where media == the actual medium of distribution not content). That is already a thing, where for example an instagrammer promoting your product is more valuable than the automated ad-network on instagram itself. At which point, hopefully, automated content and spam loses legitimacy and value as ad-media.

openrisk 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
Some stuff like the buildings and power supplies will probably remain good. But year, probably new chips in a short while.
- jacurtis 2y ago
  Power plants and power infrastructure are probably an example of a positive consequence that comes from this. We have been terrified to whisper the words "nuclear power" for decades now, but the AI boom is likely to put enough demand on the power grid that it forces us to face this reality and make appropriate buildouts. Even if the AI Boom crashes, these power plants will have positive impacts on the country for decades, likely centuries to come. Keeping bountiful power available and likely low-cost.
  - WillyWonkaJr 2y ago
    It is so bizarre that reducing pollution was not a sufficient driver to build more nuclear power, but training AI models is.
    - xvilka 2y ago
      People are absolutely irrational creatures.
      - 2y ago

andxor 2y ago

I don't take financial advice from HN and it has served me well.

3abiton 2y ago
How do you know if you had have taken some advice, it might have served you better?
- andxor 2y ago
  Indeed, downvoted advice has done great.

sparcpile 2y ago

The AI bubble will pop in the next year. We are currently in 1998 of the dotcom bubble with another AI winter approaching. LLM and generative AI are this year’s “on the Internet” or “Uber for X” business plans.

ant6n 2y ago
Will the AI bubble pop bring down the rest of the startup industry, or allow for more investment in non AI tech. Climate related tech needs more money.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Given the direction of the economy, we'd hit a recession and no one will be investing. So a loss for all tech. I argue we already are in one, but the US election cycle wants to delay that reality until 2025. Though the US did do a pretty big rate cut. I imagine that will at least stall such a bubble burst into 2026 instead.
datavirtue 2y ago
The market PE is very high and has been high for a while. Tech and AI are fueling a lot of that. Look what happened to Tesla when the fundamentals started getting a little discouraging. However, I'm not comfortable predicting the "AI bubble" popping next year.
arminiusreturns 2y ago
I don't think it will. The economy bubble will be popped post-election (you will know when the Fed starts raising rates again), but CRE (commercial real estate) is likely the catalyst this time. Within CRE, datacenters are the only item in the green in investors eyes, even more now because of the AI boom. I fully expect that class of investor to then dump more money than ever into energy generation and other sectors related to AI in order to escape the planned crash. The biggest variable is if the supranational oligarchs are wanting to use this crash to cause a much more major shift in monetary policy such as CBDCs.
- 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

EZ-E 2y ago

So there is a boom in terms of investment for future capacity. It could be interesting to see if the demand is following. I suspect there will be over capacity built, resulting some bankruptcies + cheaper compute/ai costs, hopefully allowing the next generation of startups or companies to flourish later on.

PunchTornado 2y ago

if you were to invest in datacenter stocks (AI datacenters builders), what companies would be good options?

AvaSayes 2y ago

[flagged]

Netherland4TW 2y ago
Crazy how all of your previous comments have been promoting one app/"tool" after another

_heimdall 2y ago

I'm always surprised when articles and discussions similar to this lead to anything other than the realization of how absurd it is that we have found ourselves investing unimaginable resources into a LLMs while simultaneously claiming that we've ruined the planet and it could be as little as 5 or 6 years from fundamental damage. Eventually we have to either give up on the hopes of what could come from LLMs with enough investment, or give up on very loud but apparently hollow arguments related to the damage we are causing to the planet.

gchokov 2y ago
Or maybe, just maybe, now that we have a need for more energy, we can finally come up with more sustainable ways of producing that energy?
- tempfile 2y ago
  Why would needing more energy make it easier to satisfy the total demand for energy with renewable sources?
  - pilgrim0 2y ago
    I think because settling for less is just not an option, progress at large would be hindered with a pressure for using less energy, even though it’s the right thing, arguably. Hence demand for more energy itself propels progress and innovation.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      If we're meant to believe climate predictions coming out of the UN and similar, potential innovation spurred by an increase in energy production would slam face first into the wall of climate catastrophe even faster. I'm not even saying I put much faith behind those predictions, but in the context of contradicting climate concerns with tech "innovation" requiring such massive amounts of energy it seems pertinent. We can't have it both ways, either most agree that the climate concerns are baseless or we accept that we collectively would be choosing to destroy the planet faster in the name of progress and innovation. "Progress" itself is such an interesting term. There's no directionality to it, the only meaning is that we aren't standing still. There's nothing baked into progress that would stop us from progressing right off a cliff, I suppose unless we're already off the cliff and progress could change that.