4 ms·

AI investment will crash but AI itself (the technology) will continue thriving, learning, improving and there is absolutely no way to stop it. The only reading

by Kuyawa 3mo ago

AI investment will crash but AI itself (the technology) will continue thriving, learning, improving and there is absolutely no way to stop it. The only reading on the crystal ball is if US companies fail, China will take the lead by leaps and bounds, so the only solution is to keep pushing the cart until the wheels come off or we all cross the finish line, together.

outworlder 3mo ago
Just like every AI cycle that came before. At every cycle, we get a new tool. But we also get an extended "AI Winter" where investment dries up. This has been happening since the 1980s, we just keep redefining what "AI" is. At every cycle we move the line a bit; at one point voice recognition was firmly in the AI camp(and before that, science fiction). Now we have a machine that can do that in our pockets and nobody cares. Does anyone remember expert systems?
- Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
  Douglas Hofstadter talked about these moving goalposts for AI in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach. I remember when a program that could win at chess was considered impossibly strong AI. Then, the game go. Etc. Heinlein in his book The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress imagined that people in the future would find it worthwhile, even necessary, to learn an artifical language LogLan so they could talk with computers. LogLan (Logical Language) would be designed to be totally unambiguous, a necessity for speaking with a computer. He didn't imagine that we'd simply throw so much compute at the problem that we'd teach computers to understand our vague, mumbled natural languages in all their diversity.
  - nehal3m 3mo ago
    Ah, Lojban! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban Sadly this does not let you speak to computers, just other language nerds with a lot of time.
    - laszlojamf 3mo ago
      a friend of mine did a high school project where he and a friend learnt it well enough to have a short conversation with each other. That's the only time it has come up in life until now. I hope he sees this.
classified 3mo ago
I didn't know there is a finish line.
rektomatic 3mo ago
what exactly is this finish line? AGI?
- Insanity 3mo ago
  That's what they'll sell you. But fundamentally current LLM implementations seem to be the wrong methodology for 'AGI' and I don't think we're remotely close to having this.
  - dannersy 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Yopolo 3mo ago
      This stupid LLM is already smarter than a handful of people I know. I don't think we have pushed LLMs to their limits already, its still progressing its still crazy good and its able to run even longer today than yesterday. But researchers are already working on more architectures.
    - tptacek 3mo ago
      Don't sneer at imaginary HN commenters. It's always possible to a point more persuasively than that.
- Yopolo 3mo ago
  Yes. Investors for sure don't care about people. Replace Accenture with OpenAI and you replace 800k people immediadly. Geoffrey Hinton said it in his Videos: a normal person costs A LOT of money to train, educate, onboard, keep etc. they forget things etc. AGI you train once, teach once then clone and copy and just run it. We even might already crossed the line were it is already more cost efective to train 1-5 frontier models something it doesn't know yet than teaching this to a 1000 humans.
  - tptacek 3mo ago
    Economists have a term of art for this phenomenon: "automation".
ellyagg 3mo ago
Yup. If there is a crash, those with cash and understanding will clean up. AI is eating the world, period.
toasty228 3mo ago
> absolutely no way to stop it. Unless if they take down the flat rate subs and you have to pay api prices, usage will drop a lot. Right now I freelance using gpt, if I had to pay api prices I'd probably lose 50% of the income, if not more, with the ~40% tax on top I might as well spend my time doing something else
- ursuscamp 3mo ago
  I don't necessarily buy that API prices represent "real" prices of the models.
  - xienze 3mo ago
    Well of course they're higher than marginal cost. But these providers have to also generate a fat return on investment.
  - tempfile 3mo ago
    What do you think the real price is? Subscriptions are heavily subsidised, I don't know anyone who would deny that.
    - NiloCK 3mo ago
      The general model for subscriptions is that power users are subsidized by subscriptions of casual users, like a gym membership or whatever. This is a little dicier in post-agent AI, because it's easier for casual users to automate power-user consumption, but the providers have done decently in discouraging that.
    - kbelder 3mo ago
      There's people here saying they're obviously subsidized, there's people here saying they're obviously profitable. I think they're probably subsidized, but I would hold back on saying it's obvious.
  - spwa4 3mo ago
    It's probably a safe assumption that openrouter prices for Kimi K3 are "real".
tempfile 3mo ago
There is "absolutely no way to stop" the thing that requires hundreds of billions of dollars of cash injected every year just to avoid falling over?
somewhereoutth 3mo ago
However, who will pay for the very expensive training if the ROI isn't there? Absent government subsidization, then likely the frontier models will be sold off to the hyperscalers by the bankruptcy administrators to wring a few more dollars out of them as they become out of date and more and more irrelevant - assuming that inference alone is profitable at a price the market is willing to pay of course, if not then yes the lights will indeed be turned off.
drudolph914 3mo ago
it's a bit unfair to say this is the only thing that can happen. we can just as easily assume in like over a few years, US leadership identifies that AI is an arms race, and continuing down this path leads is going to lead to a zero-sum-game. and so instead of just mindlessly pushing the cart forever, we see government intervention
palmotea 3mo ago
> AI investment will crash but AI itself (the technology) will continue thriving, learning, improving and there is absolutely no way to stop it. No, there's is a way to stop it. As obvious counterexample: go all Butlerian Jihad: death sentence for anyone caught "making a machine in the likeness of a human mind." It's doable with a few laws and treaties. I'm not saying that's the only way it could be stopped, it's just a way it could. I'm fucking sick of TINA, especially with arguments from vigorous assertion.
- _dwt 3mo ago
  HN consistently, IMO, underrates the degree to which technology adoption is “political” rather than inevitable. I was going to write a long jokey bit here but instead; counter examples - nuclear power, eugenics, the AC vs DC wars during electrification, the great firewall of China…
- goatlover 3mo ago
  It's techno determinism which assumes a libertarian view of markets where politics and culture don't matter.
Night_Thastus 3mo ago
It can't 'learn' on its own. Models only get better with mountains of RnD for data, training, and lots of fine tuning. So the moment investment dries up, models stop improving. However, it's likely we'll get good 80/20 solutions where you get most of the performance of the then-unsustainable high end models for significantly less compute.
- 1970-01-01 3mo ago
  >It can't 'learn' on its own. Nearly there today. https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme...
  - gazebo2 3mo ago
    Do we really believe marketing copy from Anthropic re: RSI considering their recent model releases seem to be markedly regressing in real world performance vs. past models?
- vrighter 3mo ago
  and lots and lots and lots of cash

by Kuyawa 3mo ago

outworlder 3mo ago

Just like every AI cycle that came before. At every cycle, we get a new tool. But we also get an extended "AI Winter" where investment dries up. This has been happening since the 1980s, we just keep redefining what "AI" is. At every cycle we move the line a bit; at one point voice recognition was firmly in the AI camp(and before that, science fiction). Now we have a machine that can do that in our pockets and nobody cares. Does anyone remember expert systems?

Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
Douglas Hofstadter talked about these moving goalposts for AI in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach. I remember when a program that could win at chess was considered impossibly strong AI. Then, the game go. Etc. Heinlein in his book The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress imagined that people in the future would find it worthwhile, even necessary, to learn an artifical language LogLan so they could talk with computers. LogLan (Logical Language) would be designed to be totally unambiguous, a necessity for speaking with a computer. He didn't imagine that we'd simply throw so much compute at the problem that we'd teach computers to understand our vague, mumbled natural languages in all their diversity.
- nehal3m 3mo ago
  Ah, Lojban! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban Sadly this does not let you speak to computers, just other language nerds with a lot of time.
  - laszlojamf 3mo ago
    a friend of mine did a high school project where he and a friend learnt it well enough to have a short conversation with each other. That's the only time it has come up in life until now. I hope he sees this.

classified 3mo ago

I didn't know there is a finish line.

rektomatic 3mo ago

what exactly is this finish line? AGI?

Insanity 3mo ago
That's what they'll sell you. But fundamentally current LLM implementations seem to be the wrong methodology for 'AGI' and I don't think we're remotely close to having this.
- dannersy 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Yopolo 3mo ago
    This stupid LLM is already smarter than a handful of people I know. I don't think we have pushed LLMs to their limits already, its still progressing its still crazy good and its able to run even longer today than yesterday. But researchers are already working on more architectures.
  - tptacek 3mo ago
    Don't sneer at imaginary HN commenters. It's always possible to a point more persuasively than that.
Yopolo 3mo ago
Yes. Investors for sure don't care about people. Replace Accenture with OpenAI and you replace 800k people immediadly. Geoffrey Hinton said it in his Videos: a normal person costs A LOT of money to train, educate, onboard, keep etc. they forget things etc. AGI you train once, teach once then clone and copy and just run it. We even might already crossed the line were it is already more cost efective to train 1-5 frontier models something it doesn't know yet than teaching this to a 1000 humans.
- tptacek 3mo ago
  Economists have a term of art for this phenomenon: "automation".

ellyagg 3mo ago

Yup. If there is a crash, those with cash and understanding will clean up. AI is eating the world, period.

toasty228 3mo ago

> absolutely no way to stop it. Unless if they take down the flat rate subs and you have to pay api prices, usage will drop a lot. Right now I freelance using gpt, if I had to pay api prices I'd probably lose 50% of the income, if not more, with the ~40% tax on top I might as well spend my time doing something else

ursuscamp 3mo ago
I don't necessarily buy that API prices represent "real" prices of the models.
- xienze 3mo ago
  Well of course they're higher than marginal cost. But these providers have to also generate a fat return on investment.
- tempfile 3mo ago
  What do you think the real price is? Subscriptions are heavily subsidised, I don't know anyone who would deny that.
  - NiloCK 3mo ago
    The general model for subscriptions is that power users are subsidized by subscriptions of casual users, like a gym membership or whatever. This is a little dicier in post-agent AI, because it's easier for casual users to automate power-user consumption, but the providers have done decently in discouraging that.
  - kbelder 3mo ago
    There's people here saying they're obviously subsidized, there's people here saying they're obviously profitable. I think they're probably subsidized, but I would hold back on saying it's obvious.
- spwa4 3mo ago
  It's probably a safe assumption that openrouter prices for Kimi K3 are "real".

tempfile 3mo ago

There is "absolutely no way to stop" the thing that requires hundreds of billions of dollars of cash injected every year just to avoid falling over?

somewhereoutth 3mo ago

However, who will pay for the very expensive training if the ROI isn't there? Absent government subsidization, then likely the frontier models will be sold off to the hyperscalers by the bankruptcy administrators to wring a few more dollars out of them as they become out of date and more and more irrelevant - assuming that inference alone is profitable at a price the market is willing to pay of course, if not then yes the lights will indeed be turned off.

drudolph914 3mo ago

it's a bit unfair to say this is the only thing that can happen. we can just as easily assume in like over a few years, US leadership identifies that AI is an arms race, and continuing down this path leads is going to lead to a zero-sum-game. and so instead of just mindlessly pushing the cart forever, we see government intervention

palmotea 3mo ago

> AI investment will crash but AI itself (the technology) will continue thriving, learning, improving and there is absolutely no way to stop it. No, there's is a way to stop it. As obvious counterexample: go all Butlerian Jihad: death sentence for anyone caught "making a machine in the likeness of a human mind." It's doable with a few laws and treaties. I'm not saying that's the only way it could be stopped, it's just a way it could. I'm fucking sick of TINA, especially with arguments from vigorous assertion.

_dwt 3mo ago
HN consistently, IMO, underrates the degree to which technology adoption is “political” rather than inevitable. I was going to write a long jokey bit here but instead; counter examples - nuclear power, eugenics, the AC vs DC wars during electrification, the great firewall of China…
goatlover 3mo ago
It's techno determinism which assumes a libertarian view of markets where politics and culture don't matter.

Night_Thastus 3mo ago

It can't 'learn' on its own. Models only get better with mountains of RnD for data, training, and lots of fine tuning. So the moment investment dries up, models stop improving. However, it's likely we'll get good 80/20 solutions where you get most of the performance of the then-unsustainable high end models for significantly less compute.

1970-01-01 3mo ago
>It can't 'learn' on its own. Nearly there today. https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme...
- gazebo2 3mo ago
  Do we really believe marketing copy from Anthropic re: RSI considering their recent model releases seem to be markedly regressing in real world performance vs. past models?
vrighter 3mo ago
and lots and lots and lots of cash