4 ms·

"At the heart of the stock stumbles, there appears to be a growing anxiety about the AI business, which is massively expensive to operate and doesn’t appear to

"At the heart of the stock stumbles, there appears to be a growing anxiety about the AI business, which is massively expensive to operate and doesn’t appear to be paying off in any concrete way." I wonder if this is a thing the U.S. should be worrying about with regard to China taking the lead. As long as the U.S. is … idling … it seems it could catch up—if in fact there is any there there with AI. But I've been told by Eric Schmidt and others that AGI is just around the corner—by year's end even. Or, it is already being demonstrated in the lab, but we just don't know about it yet.

gishh 1y ago
Catch up to what? LLMs have clearly stalled in terms of advancement, they just kind of sort of get a little bit different at this point. Not even better, just different.
- bubblelicious 1y ago
  Where does this view come from? I’m not aware of any real evidence for this. Also consider our data center buildouts in 26 and 27 will be absolutely extraordinary, and scaling is only at the beginning. You have a growing flywheel and plenty of synthetic data to break the data wall
  - candiddevmike 1y ago
    We need a fundamental paradigm shift beyond transformers. Throwing more compute or data at it isn't pushing the needle.
    - bubblelicious 1y ago
      And you don’t think that’s already happening? Also where is your evidence for this?
      - bigyabai 1y ago
        > Also where is your evidence for this? The fact that "scaling laws" didn't scale? Go open your favorite LLM in a hex editor, oftentimes half the larger tensors are just null bytes.
        bubblelicious 1y ago
        Show me a paper, this makes no sense of course scaling laws are scaling
    - marcosdumay 1y ago
      Just to point, but there's no more data. LLMs would always bottleneck on one of those two, as computing demand grows crazy quickly with the data amount, and data is necessarily limited. Turns out people threw crazy amounts of compute into it, so the we got the other limit.
      - bigyabai 1y ago
        Synthetic data works.
        marcyb5st 1y ago
        There's a limit to that according to: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y . Basically, if you use an LLM to augment a training dataset it will become "dumber" every subsequent generation and I am not sure how you can generate synthetic data for a language model without using a language model
        yorwba 1y ago
        Synthetic data doesn't have to come from an LLM. And that paper only showed that if you train on a random sample from an LLM, the resulting second LLM is a worse model of the distribution that the first LLM was trained on. When people construct synthetic data with LLMs, they typically do not just sample at random, but carefully shape the generation process to match the target task better than the original training distribution.
      - Alex2037 1y ago
        [dead]
      - Mistletoe 1y ago
        Yeah I’m constantly reminded of a quote about this- you can’t make another internet. LLMs already digested the one we have.
      - bubblelicious 1y ago
  - ModernMech 1y ago
    Let me put it this way: when ChatGPT tells me I've hit the "Free plan limit for GPT-5", I don't even notice a difference when it goes away or when it comes back. There's no incentive for me to pay them for access to 5 if the downgraded models are just as good. That's a huge problem for them.
    - _aavaa_ 1y ago
      It is a problem easily solved with advertising.
      - ModernMech 1y ago
        No, because as the history of hardware scaling shows us, things that run on supercomputers today will run on smartphones tomorrow. Current models already run fairly well on beefy desktop systems. Eventually models the quality of ChatGPT 4 will be open sourced and running on commodity systems. Then what? There's no moat.
        treis 1y ago
        10-20 years of your data in the form of chat history Billions of users allowing them to continually refund their models Hell by then your phone might be the OpenAI 1. The world's first AI powered phone (tm)
        overfeed 1y ago
        > The world's first AI powered phone Do you remember the Facebook phone? Not many people do, because it was a failed project, and that was back when Android was way more open. Every couple of years, a tech company with billions has the brilliant idea: "Why don't we have a mobile platform that we control?", followed by failure. Amazon is the only qualified success in this area.
        treis 1y ago
        I agree that a slight twist on android doesn't make sense. A phone with a in integrated LLM with apps that are essentially prompts to the LLM might be different enough to gain market share.
  - skywhopper 1y ago
    There is zero evidence that synthetic data will provide any real benefit. All common sense says it can only reinforce and amplify the existing problems with LLMs and other generative “AI”.
    - bubblelicious 1y ago
      Sounds like someone has no knowledge of the literature, synthetic data isn’t like asking ChatGPT to give you a bunch of fake internet data.
- epolanski 1y ago
  I don't see that stall. All of the tools I use get increasingly better every quarter at the very least (coding tools, research, image generation, etc).
  - afavour 1y ago
    As always it’s hype vs reality. Today we’re told AGI is just around the corner. It isn’t. You’re right that a lot of tools are improving iteratively and that’s great but the hyped up valuations we’re seeing are valuing coding assistants, they’re valuing a fictional reality where AGI solves everything and the first one there gets all the rewards.
    - epolanski 1y ago
      I haven't said a word about hype nor AGI, I merely said that LLM evolution in the tools available right now, not in the future has neither plateaued nor stalled. I'm not expressing any judgement on the economics of it.
  - Bender 1y ago
    It probably depends on the topics people are interacting with. I've spent the last few days teaching Grok how to manage iptables and nftables when all I wanted was to translate my u32 module rules into nftables and I was being lazy, something the provided translate scripts can not do. Grok would confidently give me an answer, I would say that is wrong and it would admit straight away it was wrong and would confidently give me another wrong answer and I would teach it the right answer after a bit of bumbling on my part. It feels worse than being an editor on serverfault but that's just the silly topics I play with. It could be that most topics it does fine but that has not been my experience thus far. At the end of the day I would have been better off just sticking with the man pages and tcpdump.
    - Bender 1y ago
      Adding today I tested some u32 nftable equiv rules and ran into similar issues on chatgpt. Provided I set chatgpt what OS+version and nftables version I am using it will get some of the IP header locations correct but it still gets the syntax wrong for the older version of nftables that Alpine ships with. Sometimes it does get the older syntax right, sometimes not. If I correct it chatgpt it will agree that is a safer method so I should probably start by saying to use the older methods. Both Grok and ChatGPT appear to have learned from the same sub-optimal locations.
shortrounddev2 1y ago
Why do we even want AGI so badly? It seems like a cataclysmic technology. Like after we invent it, market cap and stocks and money wont mean anything anymore
- bubblelicious 1y ago
  Why do people think this is any different than other major economic revolutions like electricity or the Industrial Revolution? Society is not going to collapse, things will just get weirder in both unbelievably positive ways and then also unbelievably negative ways, like the internet.
  - wartywhoa23 1y ago
    The question is why must the humankind strive for unbelievably positive things at the expense of being forever plagued with unbelievably negative? I'd much rather live in a world of tolerable good and bad opposing each other in moderate ways.
    - bubblelicious 1y ago
      Right let’s not have done the Industrial Revolution or the Internet or electricity
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - wartywhoa23 1y ago
        If that undoes the suffering of dozens of millions of human beings killed and maimed in WWI and WWII enabled by the Industrial Revolution, let us have not!
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - 1y ago
techblueberry 1y ago
What if we already have AGI. What if it is ChatGPT 5. What then? https://aimagazine.com/articles/openai-ceo-chatgpt-would-have-been-agi-five-years-ago https://aimagazine.com/articles/openai-ceo-chatgpt-would-hav... Edit: this was serious, if I read the Wikipedia definition of AGI, ChatGPT meets the historical definition at least. Why have we moved the goal posts?
- junon 1y ago
  Sam is wrong here, AGI has never had a clear definition, this there's no "we have" or "we haven't". I'd say most agree we're still a ways off.
  - techblueberry 1y ago
    I mean 20 years ago it was intelligence that could be used in multiple domains; the ability to reason in natural language. Which is what we have? Really, beyond this fantastical; AGI is when we have luxury automated space communism, I sort of legitimately don’t understand why ChatGPT 5 isn’t AGI. (Other than the fact that it would be super disappointing, which is maybe my point) Maybe it’s AGIv1? Maybe it’s AGI with an IQ of 47? But it’s super bipolar since it can also talk like someone with an IQ of 150x
    - acdha 1y ago
      Lack of reasoning or true understanding. It’s not just that it’s like IQ 47 but that it’s unreliable and inconsistent so you can’t safely deploy it in adversarial contexts.
      - techblueberry 1y ago
        Humans with true intelligence are unreliable and inconsistent, why would AGI be different?
        acdha 1y ago
delaminator 1y ago
> "At the heart of the stock stumbles, there appears to be a growing anxiety about the AI business, which is massively expensive to operate and doesn’t appear to be paying off in any concrete way." And stock holders realized this last week, all at the same time?
- coliveira 1y ago
  This is standard media lingo to try to give a reason for a move that has been decided by the big players. Yes, because only when these large funds decide to make a move together you can get this magnitude of movement (it's not done by mom and pop investors).
- riffraff 1y ago
  Well, a WSJ article came out last week, showing OpenAI lost 12B dollars last quarter. https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-500-nasdaq-10-31-2025/card/openai-made-a-12-billion-loss-last-quarter-microsoft-results-indicate-e71BLjJA0e2XBthQZA5X https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-5... I'm not saying this triggered a sell off, but it is indicative of perception changes.
  - delaminator 1y ago
    Which is quite a chunk. But that's one player and it's not even listed, so it can't be sold off. AMZN is +10% in the last month, -1% last week. The same AMZN the powers Anthropic. This Amazon PR video was doing the rounds this same week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TnHSRNqDqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TnHSRNqDqM 6,435 views Oct 29, 2025 Project Rainier is one of the world’s largest AI compute clusters. The collaborative infrastructure innovation delivers nearly half a million Trainium2 chips, with Anthropic scaling to more than one million chips by the end of 2025. I'm still bullish
OtherShrezzing 1y ago
> But I've been told by Eric Schmidt and others that AGI is just around the corner—by year's end even It was this time last year we were told “2025 will be the year of the agent”, with suggestions that the general population would be booking their vacations and managing their tax returns via Agents. We’re 7 weeks from the end of the year, and although there are a few notable use cases in coding and math research, agents haven’t shown to be meaningfully disruptive of most people’s economic activity. Something most people agree is AGI might arrive in the near future, but there’s still a huge effort required to diffuse that technology & its benefits throughout the economy.
skywhopper 1y ago
I don’t think anyone should be worried about AGI except for all the money, energy, and focus that’s being wasted chasing it. It’s not anywhere close, and the sooner we realize that and start focusing on actual problems, the better off we’ll be.

gishh 1y ago

Catch up to what? LLMs have clearly stalled in terms of advancement, they just kind of sort of get a little bit different at this point. Not even better, just different.

bubblelicious 1y ago
Where does this view come from? I’m not aware of any real evidence for this. Also consider our data center buildouts in 26 and 27 will be absolutely extraordinary, and scaling is only at the beginning. You have a growing flywheel and plenty of synthetic data to break the data wall
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  We need a fundamental paradigm shift beyond transformers. Throwing more compute or data at it isn't pushing the needle.
  - bubblelicious 1y ago
    And you don’t think that’s already happening? Also where is your evidence for this?
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      > Also where is your evidence for this? The fact that "scaling laws" didn't scale? Go open your favorite LLM in a hex editor, oftentimes half the larger tensors are just null bytes.
      - bubblelicious 1y ago
        Show me a paper, this makes no sense of course scaling laws are scaling
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    Just to point, but there's no more data. LLMs would always bottleneck on one of those two, as computing demand grows crazy quickly with the data amount, and data is necessarily limited. Turns out people threw crazy amounts of compute into it, so the we got the other limit.
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      Synthetic data works.
      - marcyb5st 1y ago
        There's a limit to that according to: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y . Basically, if you use an LLM to augment a training dataset it will become "dumber" every subsequent generation and I am not sure how you can generate synthetic data for a language model without using a language model
        yorwba 1y ago
        Synthetic data doesn't have to come from an LLM. And that paper only showed that if you train on a random sample from an LLM, the resulting second LLM is a worse model of the distribution that the first LLM was trained on. When people construct synthetic data with LLMs, they typically do not just sample at random, but carefully shape the generation process to match the target task better than the original training distribution.
    - Alex2037 1y ago
      [dead]
    - Mistletoe 1y ago
      Yeah I’m constantly reminded of a quote about this- you can’t make another internet. LLMs already digested the one we have.
    - bubblelicious 1y ago
- ModernMech 1y ago
  Let me put it this way: when ChatGPT tells me I've hit the "Free plan limit for GPT-5", I don't even notice a difference when it goes away or when it comes back. There's no incentive for me to pay them for access to 5 if the downgraded models are just as good. That's a huge problem for them.
  - _aavaa_ 1y ago
    It is a problem easily solved with advertising.
    - ModernMech 1y ago
      No, because as the history of hardware scaling shows us, things that run on supercomputers today will run on smartphones tomorrow. Current models already run fairly well on beefy desktop systems. Eventually models the quality of ChatGPT 4 will be open sourced and running on commodity systems. Then what? There's no moat.
      - treis 1y ago
        10-20 years of your data in the form of chat history Billions of users allowing them to continually refund their models Hell by then your phone might be the OpenAI 1. The world's first AI powered phone (tm)
        overfeed 1y ago
        > The world's first AI powered phone Do you remember the Facebook phone? Not many people do, because it was a failed project, and that was back when Android was way more open. Every couple of years, a tech company with billions has the brilliant idea: "Why don't we have a mobile platform that we control?", followed by failure. Amazon is the only qualified success in this area.
        treis 1y ago
        I agree that a slight twist on android doesn't make sense. A phone with a in integrated LLM with apps that are essentially prompts to the LLM might be different enough to gain market share.
- skywhopper 1y ago
  There is zero evidence that synthetic data will provide any real benefit. All common sense says it can only reinforce and amplify the existing problems with LLMs and other generative “AI”.
  - bubblelicious 1y ago
    Sounds like someone has no knowledge of the literature, synthetic data isn’t like asking ChatGPT to give you a bunch of fake internet data.
epolanski 1y ago
I don't see that stall. All of the tools I use get increasingly better every quarter at the very least (coding tools, research, image generation, etc).
- afavour 1y ago
  As always it’s hype vs reality. Today we’re told AGI is just around the corner. It isn’t. You’re right that a lot of tools are improving iteratively and that’s great but the hyped up valuations we’re seeing are valuing coding assistants, they’re valuing a fictional reality where AGI solves everything and the first one there gets all the rewards.
  - epolanski 1y ago
    I haven't said a word about hype nor AGI, I merely said that LLM evolution in the tools available right now, not in the future has neither plateaued nor stalled. I'm not expressing any judgement on the economics of it.
- Bender 1y ago
  It probably depends on the topics people are interacting with. I've spent the last few days teaching Grok how to manage iptables and nftables when all I wanted was to translate my u32 module rules into nftables and I was being lazy, something the provided translate scripts can not do. Grok would confidently give me an answer, I would say that is wrong and it would admit straight away it was wrong and would confidently give me another wrong answer and I would teach it the right answer after a bit of bumbling on my part. It feels worse than being an editor on serverfault but that's just the silly topics I play with. It could be that most topics it does fine but that has not been my experience thus far. At the end of the day I would have been better off just sticking with the man pages and tcpdump.
  - Bender 1y ago
    Adding today I tested some u32 nftable equiv rules and ran into similar issues on chatgpt. Provided I set chatgpt what OS+version and nftables version I am using it will get some of the IP header locations correct but it still gets the syntax wrong for the older version of nftables that Alpine ships with. Sometimes it does get the older syntax right, sometimes not. If I correct it chatgpt it will agree that is a safer method so I should probably start by saying to use the older methods. Both Grok and ChatGPT appear to have learned from the same sub-optimal locations.

shortrounddev2 1y ago

Why do we even want AGI so badly? It seems like a cataclysmic technology. Like after we invent it, market cap and stocks and money wont mean anything anymore

bubblelicious 1y ago
Why do people think this is any different than other major economic revolutions like electricity or the Industrial Revolution? Society is not going to collapse, things will just get weirder in both unbelievably positive ways and then also unbelievably negative ways, like the internet.
- wartywhoa23 1y ago
  The question is why must the humankind strive for unbelievably positive things at the expense of being forever plagued with unbelievably negative? I'd much rather live in a world of tolerable good and bad opposing each other in moderate ways.
  - bubblelicious 1y ago
    Right let’s not have done the Industrial Revolution or the Internet or electricity
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - wartywhoa23 1y ago
      If that undoes the suffering of dozens of millions of human beings killed and maimed in WWI and WWII enabled by the Industrial Revolution, let us have not!
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - 1y ago

techblueberry 1y ago

What if we already have AGI. What if it is ChatGPT 5. What then? https://aimagazine.com/articles/openai-ceo-chatgpt-would-have-been-agi-five-years-ago https://aimagazine.com/articles/openai-ceo-chatgpt-would-hav... Edit: this was serious, if I read the Wikipedia definition of AGI, ChatGPT meets the historical definition at least. Why have we moved the goal posts?

junon 1y ago
Sam is wrong here, AGI has never had a clear definition, this there's no "we have" or "we haven't". I'd say most agree we're still a ways off.
- techblueberry 1y ago
  I mean 20 years ago it was intelligence that could be used in multiple domains; the ability to reason in natural language. Which is what we have? Really, beyond this fantastical; AGI is when we have luxury automated space communism, I sort of legitimately don’t understand why ChatGPT 5 isn’t AGI. (Other than the fact that it would be super disappointing, which is maybe my point) Maybe it’s AGIv1? Maybe it’s AGI with an IQ of 47? But it’s super bipolar since it can also talk like someone with an IQ of 150x
  - acdha 1y ago
    Lack of reasoning or true understanding. It’s not just that it’s like IQ 47 but that it’s unreliable and inconsistent so you can’t safely deploy it in adversarial contexts.
    - techblueberry 1y ago
      Humans with true intelligence are unreliable and inconsistent, why would AGI be different?
      - acdha 1y ago

delaminator 1y ago

> "At the heart of the stock stumbles, there appears to be a growing anxiety about the AI business, which is massively expensive to operate and doesn’t appear to be paying off in any concrete way." And stock holders realized this last week, all at the same time?

coliveira 1y ago
This is standard media lingo to try to give a reason for a move that has been decided by the big players. Yes, because only when these large funds decide to make a move together you can get this magnitude of movement (it's not done by mom and pop investors).
riffraff 1y ago
Well, a WSJ article came out last week, showing OpenAI lost 12B dollars last quarter. https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-500-nasdaq-10-31-2025/card/openai-made-a-12-billion-loss-last-quarter-microsoft-results-indicate-e71BLjJA0e2XBthQZA5X https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-5... I'm not saying this triggered a sell off, but it is indicative of perception changes.
- delaminator 1y ago
  Which is quite a chunk. But that's one player and it's not even listed, so it can't be sold off. AMZN is +10% in the last month, -1% last week. The same AMZN the powers Anthropic. This Amazon PR video was doing the rounds this same week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TnHSRNqDqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TnHSRNqDqM 6,435 views Oct 29, 2025 Project Rainier is one of the world’s largest AI compute clusters. The collaborative infrastructure innovation delivers nearly half a million Trainium2 chips, with Anthropic scaling to more than one million chips by the end of 2025. I'm still bullish

OtherShrezzing 1y ago

> But I've been told by Eric Schmidt and others that AGI is just around the corner—by year's end even It was this time last year we were told “2025 will be the year of the agent”, with suggestions that the general population would be booking their vacations and managing their tax returns via Agents. We’re 7 weeks from the end of the year, and although there are a few notable use cases in coding and math research, agents haven’t shown to be meaningfully disruptive of most people’s economic activity. Something most people agree is AGI might arrive in the near future, but there’s still a huge effort required to diffuse that technology & its benefits throughout the economy.

skywhopper 1y ago

I don’t think anyone should be worried about AGI except for all the money, energy, and focus that’s being wasted chasing it. It’s not anywhere close, and the sooner we realize that and start focusing on actual problems, the better off we’ll be.