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AI is too expensive
- jqpabc123 5mo agoIt's just getting started. You won't find out what the real, actual cost is until after you build it into your workflow. In other words; right now, we're still in the "bait" phase. The "switch" comes later.
- happyPersonR 5mo agoNext year is gonna be when the “switch” comes lollll
- ReptileMan 5mo agoNext year we will have new deepseek.
- happyPersonR 5mo agoI see a couple of possibilities 1) someone deepseeks deepseek lol: Generates their own weights and figures out a way to determine all of the intermediate states. 2) places realize there’s real risk with using a model that might have things baked into it that produce specific flaws that could be security bugs, but only under certain conditions.
- gdulli 5mo agoAnd the switch will continue, it won't be a one-time event. Like how the price of Netflix etc. keeps going up periodically. If people's dependence on their streaming service keeps them captive, just wait until people have gone 5 years without doing real work.
- kakaz 5mo ago[dead]
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo agoChinese 1T+ models are being offered at a fraction of GPT/Claude cost, and the margin is healthy enough for dozens of providers to compete, so I find it highly likely that ClosedAI and Misanthropic sell tokens at massive markup. they just still bleed billions on their free tier and san francisco salaries.
- citrin_ru 5mo agoWhy we should assume that whoever offers these Chinese models makes sufficient profits and will not rise the prices eventually too?
- han1 5mo agoChinese models are state-funded and not concerned with taking profits.
- throawayonthe 5mo agothat's not how that works regardless, the parent comment is talking about third parties hosting, for a fee, the openly available models, usually outside china
- larme 5mo agoSome of these models are open weight. You can try hosting them and do the price calculation yourself. They also publish papers talking about how to save kv cache and computation powers. Because currently they don't have the most powerful nvidia cards, training and inference efficiency is very import for them.
- bakugo 5mo ago[dead]
- simianwords 5mo agoIf AI is too costly: bubble will burst because costs are unsustainable. If AI is too cheap: bubble will burst because you can run them locally and data centrs are not needed. If is it in-between, AI companies make too much money and they make too much profit which is bad! I don't think this guy is a serious commentator.
- harimau777 5mo agoI mean, those all seem like true statements.
- sophacles 5mo agoThis isn't an accurate summary, even at a 50Kft view. Are you a serious commentator?
- sailfast 5mo agoThese are all just bets that eventually someone wins anyway, right? Adoption is good but marginal revenue doesn’t matter if and when these models and solving world hunger - or have created the next yakuza mega corp that governs the world - right? Feels like an unspoken rule here. Everyone wants to own a chunk of nuclear weapons and it doesn’t matter whether it’s profitable. You just need the nukes to survive and have a seat at the table
- hypnodrones 5mo agoThe rug pull on users is bound to happen and it will involve advertising.
- add-sub-mul-div 5mo agoAlgorithmically and seamlessly weaving undisclosed advertising (or other editorial content) into conversational output is their holy grail. It's the endgame. There's a reason they're pushing so hard.
- hypnodrones 5mo agoI'd even walk back on just calling it advertising, because we immediately think of the usual ads we see everywhere. The actual thing here might be much more subtle and worrying, you could call it undisclosed influence.
- add-sub-mul-div 5mo agoThat's right. Soon we'll need a new term to describe this alongside the growing lexicon of "slop" and "hallucination".
- sybercecurity 5mo agoProbably endgame plus getting "too big to fail" and getting gov't bailouts if things don't work out. It's part of the lobbying theme that LLMs are the next great power struggle.
- WarmWash 5mo agoI mean, we could just avoid this if people realize it's not morally wrong to pay for a service.
- lifestyleguru 5mo agoThe vibe coded software designed from the ground up to contain ads will be something regrettable. Will be like a doctor smoking cigarettes while prescribing opiates.
- Havoc 5mo agoIt’s a similar bet as Uber. They also started out with numbers that make no sense - overpaying drivers and undercharging users The math may look questionable but there are also senior people talking of automating all white color work in the next couple years. Even if that estimate is miles off on both time and % it’s still trillions. So crazy as the numbers seem it could still work out
- empath75 5mo agoCars and gas and human labor do not get cheaper over time the way that computer hardware does.
- Havoc 5mo agoOne more argument to support the view that the numbers could work here crazy as they seem
- not_the_fda 5mo agoAutomating white color work in the next couple years will cause the greatest demand destruction humans have ever seen.
- Havoc 5mo agoMaybe. I think it'll just result in vulnerable getting squeezed harder. Very dystopian but I'm not convinced it's a showstopper in the "this rules out such a future" sense
- overgard 5mo agoMore people need to read Ed, especially tech journalists. I feel like he's one of the rare few people that are actually speaking about the industry honestly.
- nstart 5mo agoI've been subscribed to ed for a long time. I commend his foundational ideas like what he laid out in "The Era of the Business Idiot" or "The Rot Economy". My recommendation line for him to anyone else is "if nothing else, he'll leave you with something to chew on for a while to come". My issue with Ed is that he doesn't have the ability to draw the line. In the pursuit of making a point he goes so dogmatic that he is willing to make harsh statements that go beyond number backed predictions. Like in his piece "AI is really weird" he states about agents, "Probably the weirdest thing about this entire era is how nobody wants to talk about the fact that AI isn’t actually doing very much, and that AI agents are just chatbots plugged into an API.". That's a massive stretch to make. Just because he has a claim that the business doesn't make sense, he doesn't get to claim that agents are not capable of doing very real work. His assessment of cowork was "a chatbot that deleted every single one of a guy’s photos when he asked it to organize his wife’s desktop.". These statements damage his credibility and make it too easy to dismiss his writing as a rant of an angry man.
- GolfPopper 5mo ago>"Probably the weirdest thing about this entire era is how nobody wants to talk about the fact that AI isn’t actually doing very much, and that AI agents are just chatbots plugged into an API." That's a massive stretch to make. With the notable exception of TTI models, that description seems accurate to me. Is there any widely promoted "AI product" that is more than a chatbot in fancy dress?
- nstart 5mo agoThats the thing though. The reduction of agents to Chatbots in a fancy dress doesn't make sense. Whether there's much of a moat to the models agentic approaches is a different question. But the idea of reframing questions and results in a back and forth between itself while holding on to context and all the laundered knowledge it has (no I'm never letting go of the lack of ethics in its knowledge acquisition) is an impressive feat. To say it isn't doing much is to liken someone doing any kind of thinking as doing nothing much. I'm not saying LLMs are sentient or intelligent in a human sense. But their synthetic intelligence does have capabilities that are impressive and they are capable of reducing so much busy work for me personally. Those ai agents that aren't apparently doing much can help me narrow down my reading about prior art in security implementations super quickly by going site by site, categorizing, locating the correct page in docs, or a Reddit discussion, extracting a relevant paragraph, sourcing it, and putting it down for me. The idea that this isn't much is reductive. That would have been 2 hours of my energy previously and instead I pick up the completed work, visit the links I asked the agent to get for me, do my reading in a pre planned structured way, and complete my work (I always try to be respectful of source material instead of attributing to the LLM). That is very useful behaviour and I think we thumb our nose at it to our own detriment.
- bensyverson 5mo agoIf you're older than 30, you've seen this play out before… This is just how the VC game works. Cross-town Uber rides don't stay $5 forever. The bright side is: this is a golden era of subsidized tokens. It will not always be like this, so now is the time to churn out your passion projects.
- Aeolun 5mo agoI think the good news is that we’re not at peak cheapness for tokens yet, but companies like deepseek show that it is perfectly possible.
- BoredPositron 5mo agoProbably the worst comparison I have seen on the topic. gz.
- TheSkyHasEyes 5mo agoEventually you come to realize the more things change the more they stay the same.
- BoredPositron 5mo agoSorry but no. It's a flawed analogy to suggest that an emerging technology like AI follows the same scaling laws as the taxi industry. AI benefits from active R&D, rapidly improving hardware, compounding software efficiencies, and deflationary cost curves that simply have no equivalent in a labor- and vehicle-dependent service...
- grebc 5mo agoYeah. And we were going to use blockchains & ledgers to store & process every single skerrick of data possible… oh wait…
- BoredPositron 5mo ago
- dosinga 5mo agoThe counter argument (not mine): Software Engineers are willing to spend their own money on AI. The same people that wouldn't pay 10 dollars for code if there was a workaround that took hours.
- nubg 5mo agoInteresting perspective
- ihsw 5mo ago[dead]
- simianwords 5mo agoI did a thought experiment: if you went back to 2019 and could use AI in your job at the current market price - like lets say using the latest Deepseek V4, would you pay for it? Hell yeah obviously. There's close to no doubt. So why do we think its not true now?
- graydsl 5mo agoAm I the only one that has AI or does everyone? If everyone has it what is the thought experiment? Why 2019?
- righthand 5mo agoThe same people that laugh at you when you mention paying for Kagi or alternative to an advertising supported web.
- dosinga 5mo agoYes! It's a great addition to the argument
- Forgeties79 5mo ago> Software Engineers are willing to spend their own money on AI. Unless you’re a freelancer you should never pay for your tools. You’re literally paying your company to do their work. If they want the benefits of an LLM they can pay for it. Otherwise they get what you came with: your hands and skills.
- changoplatanero 5mo agoImagine you were looking at Google, a sustainable and profitable business, and you thought you saw a once in a lifetime opportunity to compete with them and take their position as a leading tech company. How much money would you need to spend to make a credible attempt? Google has had decades to accumulate intellectual and physical capital. Catching up quickly means spending >500 billion. If you can actually dethrone Google (admittedly not an easy task) then it will have been worth it. If not, I suppose it's wasted investment. Now what happens when three or four startups vie for this opportunity at once? Well that's how you get $2 trillion in captial investments per year.
- elorant 5mo agoProblem is that Google practically invented LLMs. So it’s not like they’d sit around while you try to eat their lunch.
- jayd16 5mo agoWhat a strange train of thought. Why would you need that amount in this hypothetical? Why would dethroning them alone be worth it? It would literally only be worth it if you could do so profitably. More realistically, it seems like someone calculated that it could still be profitable up to several hundreds of billions of dollars which explains the initial investment. And continued investment can be explained by trying to salvage the existing capital spend. But even if it's the best option those companies have now as far as a hypothetical goes, it still might not have been worth it.
- doctorpangloss 5mo agoYou: says someone has a strange train of thought, and then you also ask how can a company become profitable in a situation where it becomes a monopoly? Dude, the winner raises prices? "AI" is not expensive enough!
- mstank 5mo agoI think the opposite is true. To dethrone the top tech company, you need to be able to spend much less than them, at higher efficiency and faster growth. Google didn’t catch up to Microsoft and Apple by spending more, they caught up by developing business lines and flywheels that were much more capital efficient. If it’s a spending game, the incumbent has a huge advantage.
- hoansdz 5mo agoThe cost of tokens used by AI in many fields is even greater than the cost of human services; people are experiencing FOMO, but once the wave passes, the market will stabilize.
- KoolKat23 5mo agoThe timing of this is great considering Google's rumoured Gemini 3.5 flash pricing spike.
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- eloisant 5mo agoThe thing that everyone seems to be missing is that the US AI companies are focused on the frontier models, that are very expensive for diminishing returns. If suddenly the money craze stops, meaning (1) AI companies investors want them to become profitable and (2) clients start being cost-sensitive to AI bills (which they are absolutely not currently), then everyone will switch to smaller, cheaper models that are enough for a lot of use case. Sonnet instead of Opus. GPT 5.4 instead of 5.5. Chinese models. People keep comparing to Uber but Uber can't suddenly make it cheaper to operate.
- d0100 5mo ago> GPT 5.4 instead of 5.5. I am exclusively using 5.4 because its only 1x and very good, but the github calculation showed my once $40 become a $680 billing That is too expensive and not worth paying
- not_the_fda 5mo agoI work in design services and see clients already being cost sensitive to AI bills. They have wait lists, rationing, push to lower tier / cheaper models. This is all with subsidized pricing. People are going to decide its too expensive for everyone to use AI agents and un-subsidized pricing.
- etempleton 5mo agoThis is absolutely what I think will happen eventually, and I think that becomes a huge problem for Open AI and Anthropic because I don’t think that allows investors to make back their money.
- catdog 5mo agoI think it will in general go more into the direction of using the technology a bit smarter. This will include smaller models but certainly also just less usage overall. Currently a lot of people seem to just burn through tokens without thinking much about what they actually get in return or if an LLM really is actually overall the best tool for the job.
- czhu12 5mo agoI really respected Ed Zitron, but I feel like he's very much lost the plot on AI. Scroll back not too far and he was publishing criticisms that no one wants to spend actual money AI. Anthropic has shattered all notions of that since then. Then there was the idea that even if people want it, we have way too much GPU capacity to ever be saturated. Now almost all providers are hitting limits. Now, its the next iteration that even if people want to spend money and GPU's are at capacity, its just never going to be profitable. This may or may not be true, especially with more capable open source models that can be served at cost. But at this point, he mostly just brings up anything possible to downplay AI
- ant_li0n 5mo agoI agree. He plainly has an axe to grind. I'm as AI-skeptical as the next guy, but I can't handle Ed Zitron. Doesn't seem like a good faith actor.
- Analemma_ 5mo agoI said this in the last Ed Zitron article too, but it's more than just having an axe or grind or acting in bad faith (though those are both true as well). He's a completely standard example of audience capture: there's huge demand right now for "AI is a scam" takes, fulfilling that demand is how he makes his living, and he can't abandon it without losing his audience no matter what the facts on the ground do. All he can do is pivot explanations whenever the old ones get empirically falsified.
- dw_arthur 5mo agoI don't understand his audience still being in denial about what is coming. There may not be a job apocalypse but there is a decent chance tough times are ahead. Eventually, his audience may turn into outright Luddites. If that happens I sort of hope they don't stop at data centers/AI and go for the whole project of the Internet.
- Aurornis 5mo ago
- pingou 5mo agoThe end goal of these companies is AGI, or even ASI. If you believe this is around the corner, and think AI can do the job of a human for less money, it makes sense to put all your money into working towards that goal and buying as much compute as you can. This is especially true since whoever gets there first (or is simply ahead and can use their AI to get even better) gets a big advantage.
- skybrian 5mo agoI’m paying API prices for my hobby coding due to the coding agent I use. So far I’ve switched from Opus to Sonnet to GLM 5.1. Looks like it’s about 25% of the cost and quality seems good enough so far. I think competition is going to keep customer costs low if you’re willing to switch. Maybe people on expense accounts won’t care, though?
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- slackfan 5mo ago> If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month... This blog is too expensive too.
- chipotle_coyote 5mo agoIt seems to me (entirely anecdotal, YMMV, etc. etc.) that Ed Zitron’s blog posts started getting both longer and considerably more histrionic when he started moving most of them behind a paywall. I’m definitely in the “AI skeptic” camp and think Zitron has good points to make about both the shaky business models around AI and the unrelenting hype train, but it’s hard not to get the impression that he’s found a niche of preaching to the rabid AI haters willing to give him money to keep spouting increasingly repetitive vitriol toward Sam Altman and Dario Amodei.
- feverzsj 5mo agoThey are betting on AGI, in other words, Bullshit.
- wagwang 5mo agoYou have to look at use cases and there are a bunch of slam dunk use cases that are wildly profitable at todays token prices, whether we keep finding use cases as intelligence goes up is another story.
- luk212 5mo agoA lot of the current AI economics seems to depend on three assumptions being true at once: 1. inference costs fall fast enough 2. usage grows into very large recurring revenue 3. customers don't cut once handed the bill We should draw a distinction between "AI is valuable" and "AI justifies its current investment levels." There's real productivity value in AI, especially for things like search, boilerplate, tests, refactoring, etc...BUT that doesn't mean every enterprise should let token spend grow without strict telemetry, cost-attribution and outcome-based measurements. The teams that win here will not be the ones using the Most AI, but the ones that treat it like any other expensive production dependency, which means measuring unit economics, cap runway usage, properly align models with tasks(not just Opus everything), and scale workflows with ROI in mind.
- clearstack 5mo agoMSFT, GOOGL, META, AMZN guided ~$285B combined capex for 2025 — roughly matching their total net income. Every dollar of profit is being plowed back in, which only works if #1 and #2 both hold.
- voidstitch 5mo ago[flagged]
- autoexec 5mo agoIf you think it's expensive now, imagine what they'll do if they get their way and people become dependent on it. Once they've got businesses and consumers over a barrel the gloves will come off and they'll skip the lube. The good news is that we can decide we don't actually need it. Maybe it'll take a generation or two to recover the skills and mental abilities we lost by outsourcing everything to the bots but accepting shitty results in exchange for getting them faster and easier is a choice, and it's up to us to decide when it isn't worth it anymore. Right now, a lot of the costs (especially the environmental ones) are mostly hidden from and removed enough from users that "fast and easy" is still very tempting. People are still learning for themselves what the limitations are and how different what AI delivers is from what they were promised. There's plenty of time for people make a lot of money and cause a lot of harm before the bubble bursts, companies realize AGI isn't going to happen, and the true costs get properly factored in.
- tim333 5mo agoThe AI related companies seem to be doing ok. Google profits $132bn Microsoft $102bn. Anthropic losing about $10bn but on revenue of $30bn up from $14bn a year or so ago. I don't think it's all going bust too quickly.
- etempleton 5mo agoGoogle, Microsoft, etc will be fine. But their stock market valuation may drop substantially.
- tomxor 5mo ago> You are not recovering these investments OK, Question: Would this outcome still benefit society overall? In the aftermath of this bubble "AI" will still have utility, like the dotcom bubble. So lets say FANG doesn't make a return, how much should we care? How much of this investment is sunk cost that would continue to provide value, and how much of it is operation costs just keeping the lights, I mean GPUs on, that would become unviable post-bubble? As an immediate effect, what happens to these AI companies? or if they become insolvent, what happens to the assets and tech? and what are the secondary economical effect to society if FANG doesn't get their ROI?
- didgetmaster 5mo agoAlthough the data centers are probably optimized for AI workloads; they can probably be used for all kinds of computing tasks. If AI revenue does not meet projections, the hardware is not going to be unused.
- semiquaver 5mo agoThis guy is the master of goalposts. He never cops to the fact that he is constantly being proven wrong and changing his tune every few months to a new theme which he will abandon as soon as it’s not supported. I’d like to think that if I was as catastrophically, publicly, consistently incorrect on the main thing I do, I’d have a little more humility than this charlatan.
- DonsDiscountGas 5mo agoI like how he mentions that "AI revenue would need to EXPLODE", seemingly oblivious to the fact that it has been exploding for months
- etempleton 5mo agoOpenAI is missing their own revenue targets. There are worrying signs that growth is starting to plateau or diversify across players in a way where not everyone will be able to eat.
- minimaxir 5mo ago"Revenue is exploding" and "OpenAI is missing their own revenue targets" are not mutually exclusive.
- etempleton 5mo agoYes, but those targets are to reach their own timeline for breakeven and if they aren’t able to break even by 2030 I can’t imagine when they will
- nate 5mo agoI'm actually surprised how much now I'm reaching for Apple Intelligence as a thing to play and build on top of because of its freeness :) I have it summarizing articles for me, a task I thought I'd only want at a minimum Claude Sonnet doing, but alas, I'm not caring as much as I thought about Claude's much better quality over Apple's on device models version. For non anecdotal evidence, I saw people balking at the price of having to put more tokens/credits towards using AlliHat (the Safari extension I have out there for Claude). And so all I did was put Apple Intelligence as an alternative into it, and my conversion rate has tripled. Still measuring this out but I'm becoming more bullish on just using the free tokens we get from our apple devices.
- josefritzishere 5mo agoAI is not worth the cost of AI. We know this to a certainty as zero Ai companies are profitable, and the most popular uses of AI are free. The natural laws of commerce would dictate that it should die. Financial scheming will only delay the inevitable.
- KevinMS 5mo agoIt not impossible that hyperscale AI turns out to be a very expensive proof of concept for when hardware is fast and cheap enough decades from now, like those first video games played on mainframes and minicomputers.
- zkmon 5mo agoFirst, the cloud providers would invest into anything that will increase their revenues. It's not really about AI. For Microsoft. Azure and Cpilot arr the revenue channels. They are just investing on these channels. What if the things, on which they are investing, go bust? Well, they do calculate their risk when they invest on startups. The overall picture? Not everyone's calculations will yield good predictions. Some of these cloud sharks go bust when, for example. OpenAI folds. The game is, winner gets it all. We are heading into monopolies in every layer.
- dgudkov 5mo agoI don't see any problem with refunding the massive AI expenses. All the AI costs will be pushed down on consumers whether they need AI or not. Nobody will ask them. Everybody is so deeply hooked on SaaS and cloud and LLM providers that they have lost any bargaining power and will pay whatever prices the hyperscalers and SaaS platforms will tell them to pay. The prices have already been raising because "now it includes AI". To pay back $3 trillion, 1 billion consumers will have to pay just $3000 each, or $83/mo monthly over 3 years, on average. Of course they will pay that and even more.
- KronisLV 5mo agoI mean if I was one of the enterprises or someone that wants VC funding, I'd be pretty upset at the state of things. But if it's a bunch of huge orgs and investors sinking their money into a bet that may or may not work out, I for one appreciate that Anthropic (and OpenAI and others too) let me have a bunch of subsidized subscription tokens probably below their real value. Unless the bubble bursts instead of a slow cooldown after the peak of the hype cycle and something close to 2008 happens and the losses would somehow get offloaded upon the regular folks, then it'd suck. Seeing as programming seems to be one of the most widespread use cases https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48179021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48179021 then what those large orgs should be doing is talk up developers and try to get more goodwill and maybe increase the dev salaries of those who can wield those tools (though realistically they don't care and devaluation of software development work will happen, coupling it to AI anyways regardless of how people feel about it). Except for them driving up the RAM prices. And also more or less meaning that Intel Arc B770 won't happen. Fuck them for that. Oh and also the people struggling with increased electricity prices and pollution, and water availability. In a functioning country I think there can be enough regulation and enforcement to either fine the crap out of them or put people in jail (e.g. for messing with the environment by using illegal generators and trying to exploit loopholes), though I don't think there's ANY regulatory answer to companies going: "Yeah, we don't care about consumer segment, we're just making hardware for AI and enterprise now." Tone of the article very much reads like a rant at some points. Guess the status quo will push people to that, with AI hate also being a massive social trend. I wonder what the economics behind DeepSeek and others over there are like, especially in the case if they distill Western models somewhat.
- commieneko 5mo agoA boy is trapped in a cave that is filled with treasure. But it is dark. He can't see to find his way out. And even if he could see, can he get out? He finds a lamp. Is it really real? He rubs it with his hand and it begins to glow! The cave is fulled with light that shines and sparkles off all the untold treasure filling the caverns. In the center, towering above the boy is a Djinn. "I am the Djinn of the Lamp." It says. Command me and I will give you whatever you wish." The boy says, "I wish for gold! Give me gold!" "What do you want gold for?" the Djinn asks. "To buy nice things. Great things!" the boy says. "Ask for the things!" The Djinn says, "And I will create them for you." "But if you give me nice things, then someone will take them from me! I need gold to pay for an army to protect me and my nice things." The Djinn laughs and says, "I will make you an army that worships you! They will be the greatest army ever. And they will never betray you." "Then I will need gold to feed the army and to buy land to keep my nice things." "These too I can make for you, master." The Djinn says. "You have but to ask." The boy thinks about this. Then a sly smile crosses his face. "Can you give me your power? So that I can make these things for myself?" "Yes." says the Djinn,"But my power is tied to the Lamp. You must become one with the Lamp. Knowing all, seeing all. You will want for nothing because you will need nothing. The Lamp is perfection. You will live in a state of grace within it." "Let it be so." The boy said. The Djinn nodded and his light shone and filled the cave, the world, the sky. The boy grew until he was as big as the Djinn was. Was, because the Djinn shrank down and became an old man. A look of perfect bliss appeared on the Boy's giant face. He was all powerful, all knowing. He retreated into the Lamp and assumed his position as its keeper. The old man, who had been the Djinn sighed. He was tired. His back hurt. His clothing was worn and patched. "I need a nap." The old man said. He lay down and went to sleep. He woke many hours later and stretched. He felt much better. Like the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders. The old man looked around. There on the floor was the lamp. He bent down, groaning, and picked it up. He rubbed it three times and the cavern filled with light. The boy, now a giant appeared. He looked down and saw the old man. "I am the Djinn of the Lamp. What do you want with me. I'm busy running the Universe." "I need some new cloths and a new hat. Nothing fancy." "Yes, yes." The Djinn said. He waved his hands and the old man's cloths changed. Nothing fancy, but very nice. "There, your wish is granted. Now I must be off. My world awaits." "Before you leave," the old man said. "I would like some breakfast. And a few gold coins. Jut a few, so I won't have to bother you so much." The Djinn waved his hands and a table with food appeared. Beside the filled plate was a small purse. "I must go now." The Djinn said. "Anything else?" The old man started to eat. Between bites he said, "No ... Oh wait. Yes. Please unlock the back door to the cave." The Djinn waved his hands, but paused. "Do you need a light? The cave will be dark when I am gone." "No, that's okay." The old man smiled. He held up the Lamp. "I have a light."
- cushychicken 5mo agoUber was too expensive once, too, and yet they seem to be currently functioning as a profitable public company. “AI is too expensive right now” is an accurate title. Plenty of things could change in the future to change that. Off the top of my head: * end user pricing * breakthroughs in model efficiency * better chips to run models Any one of these things is easily possible in the next three years. Probably sooner.
- fwlr 5mo agoNobody who’s this insistent, aggressive and violative with their language of “it’s here and if you don’t adopt it you’re stupid and dead” has ever been right about anything. Nobody this desperate, insistent and forceful has ever had good intentions, good vibes or brought good omens — they are always bearers of some kind of con. Hey, Ed’s almost there! Critics will throw around words like “rage” and “mad” and “crazy”, but unhinged anger is an inevitable and necessary step for every person’s first trip through this process. I think there’s two productive avenues for reaching the other side here. One is thinking more about the data centers - put aside the “overconfident and unaware of how hard it is to build data centers” hypothesis and instead start by assuming that “announcing and funding a huge data center and never actually building it” is the intended/desired/achieved outcome, and see where that train of thought takes you. (Teaser: interesting how they had the unusually prescient foresight to make SPVs and cardboard cutout companies the bag-holders - specifically in the case of building data centers, but not for any of their other ai-related capex outlay?) The other avenue would be looking at crypto’s history - it started as a collection of computer science concepts cleverly combined to produce a fiat currency where the issuing government is Mathematics (infinitely more rigidly enforced, but infinitely less concerned with exercising control). Yet now it clearly resembles an unlicensed casino or an unregulated stock market. Imagine this transformation was the intentional result of some plan. What does the entity who came up with and executed this plan look like? What was its goal, why did it want this, and how did it benefit?
- mikewarot 5mo agoAll of this late stage capitalism has a vulnerability, open source/open weight models. There's nothing stopping China, or even an AI powered researcher, from lowering the compute requirements for a good enough model to the point where it can run on a beefy desktop, or even your phone. At that point, all this investment is about as useful as dark fiber was after the 2000 crash. Actually, worse... the dark fiber could be utilized with new hardware, and kept supporting more and more bandwidth over time. These data centers are filled with hardware stuck in the present, or past... that won't become more performant over time. What worries me most is that the entire US economy seems to be held up by this bubble.