3 ms·

> plan for a world where it's always summer The difficulty in adopting this belief lies in the fact we have multiple points of reference in the past, of vision

> plan for a world where it's always summer The difficulty in adopting this belief lies in the fact we have multiple points of reference in the past, of visionaries claiming that "this time is different" and we reached the end of history... and well, the rest is history.

wahnfrieden 1mo ago
But the models are useful now and Inference is profitable. At most we must worry that the latest is not actually useful, or that they won’t get better.
- disgruntledphd2 1mo ago
  > Inference is profitable Let's wait for Anthropic's S-1 to see if this is actually true. Fundamentally, if Anthropic ain't profitable with all the investment and usage they get, then it's possible that it may not be economical to train new models in the future (I agree that inference for already trained models makes money, but the real question is if this money will pay for the cost of training & employees).
bpodgursky 1mo ago
I hear you, but this time is different and history doesn't tell us what happens next. They were wrong those times. They would be correct today. I don't have any clever argument to justify this, you just have to look at the ways the world is changing today and decide for yourself whether there is a clean historical analog.
kaashif 1mo ago
It's a pun on AI winter - if there's not going to be a winter, then it's always summer. But things won't be static. It is in fact normal for new technologies to be adopted, and for there to be no cycle where the technology just disappears. There was no Internet winter or railroad winter, not in the same way there was an AI winter where AI just went away. Those technologies had valuation bubbles but the technologies themselves stuck around and changed the world beyond recognition. If someone sees the rate of change and thinks it'll stop for...some reason, then they're the ones who believe things are different this time.
- sebastiennight 1mo ago
  My counterpoint is that "the internet" is quite recent, and has had many iterations - we've basically abandoned gopher, mostly irc, etc. Even "the web" as we know it is arguably entering a winter we can't yet foresee the duration of. I 100% agree that "AI" is not going anywhere as long as humans are here (I wouldn't be building a company in the space otherwise). I'm challenging this specific absolute certainty that "a swarm of agents building code like ants" will be living in eternal summer. This paradigm might be completely different just 6 months from now, from all we know!
robotresearcher 1mo ago
Yes that’s very sanguine. On the other hand there have been many times when tech made a permanent difference. Smartphones, internet, PCs, computers, semiconductors, relativity, antibiotics, telegraph, printing, electricity, steam power, … It has stayed comms and compute summer since the end of the twentieth century. It has stayed infection summer since the beginning of the twentieth century. You get the idea.
hiAndrewQuinn 1mo ago
I don't see why we would weight those points of reference stronger than the ones where people claimed "this time is different", and it really was different. In fact there's almost nothing similar between my day to day life and the day to day life even of my grandfather, to say nothing of the Irish peasantry I came from 500 years ago, say. The number of correct everything-is-differences per year seems to be going up, not down.
novok 1mo ago
In tech 'this time it's different' happens about every 10 years, so yes? Mainframes, minicomputers, the PC revolution, the internet in the 90s, commodity cloud computing: even more internet, the smartphone and now AI. It's not the end of history, it's the continuation.

wahnfrieden 1mo ago

But the models are useful now and Inference is profitable. At most we must worry that the latest is not actually useful, or that they won’t get better.

disgruntledphd2 1mo ago
> Inference is profitable Let's wait for Anthropic's S-1 to see if this is actually true. Fundamentally, if Anthropic ain't profitable with all the investment and usage they get, then it's possible that it may not be economical to train new models in the future (I agree that inference for already trained models makes money, but the real question is if this money will pay for the cost of training & employees).

bpodgursky 1mo ago

I hear you, but this time is different and history doesn't tell us what happens next. They were wrong those times. They would be correct today. I don't have any clever argument to justify this, you just have to look at the ways the world is changing today and decide for yourself whether there is a clean historical analog.

kaashif 1mo ago

It's a pun on AI winter - if there's not going to be a winter, then it's always summer. But things won't be static. It is in fact normal for new technologies to be adopted, and for there to be no cycle where the technology just disappears. There was no Internet winter or railroad winter, not in the same way there was an AI winter where AI just went away. Those technologies had valuation bubbles but the technologies themselves stuck around and changed the world beyond recognition. If someone sees the rate of change and thinks it'll stop for...some reason, then they're the ones who believe things are different this time.

sebastiennight 1mo ago
My counterpoint is that "the internet" is quite recent, and has had many iterations - we've basically abandoned gopher, mostly irc, etc. Even "the web" as we know it is arguably entering a winter we can't yet foresee the duration of. I 100% agree that "AI" is not going anywhere as long as humans are here (I wouldn't be building a company in the space otherwise). I'm challenging this specific absolute certainty that "a swarm of agents building code like ants" will be living in eternal summer. This paradigm might be completely different just 6 months from now, from all we know!

robotresearcher 1mo ago

Yes that’s very sanguine. On the other hand there have been many times when tech made a permanent difference. Smartphones, internet, PCs, computers, semiconductors, relativity, antibiotics, telegraph, printing, electricity, steam power, … It has stayed comms and compute summer since the end of the twentieth century. It has stayed infection summer since the beginning of the twentieth century. You get the idea.

hiAndrewQuinn 1mo ago

I don't see why we would weight those points of reference stronger than the ones where people claimed "this time is different", and it really was different. In fact there's almost nothing similar between my day to day life and the day to day life even of my grandfather, to say nothing of the Irish peasantry I came from 500 years ago, say. The number of correct everything-is-differences per year seems to be going up, not down.

novok 1mo ago

In tech 'this time it's different' happens about every 10 years, so yes? Mainframes, minicomputers, the PC revolution, the internet in the 90s, commodity cloud computing: even more internet, the smartphone and now AI. It's not the end of history, it's the continuation.