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Comment by cjk2 | Hacker News Reader

It's not about an energy apocalypse at all. It's about the cost versus benefit when the principal cost on large scale deployments is energy. AI stuff takes a lot of energy to run therefore costs a lot of money to run therefore requires revenue that matches the energy used.

Now the problem is that if someone puts a $10/month price on the AI functionality, they will stop paying for it because it doesn't really have a $10/month ROI.

Literally every AI thing I've seen people use has got an interest taper off way before the free trial even ends.

The constraining factor will prevent an energy apocalypse: It doesn't materially improve most people's lives at all.

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> It doesn't materially improve most people's lives at all.

What about all the people here who were claiming GPT-4 had become an essential part of their developer job?

They seem to have gone quiet recently, but they must still be here.

These are the same "developers" who claimed their application was secure because they used multiple blockchains.

Two reasons they went quiet:

1. At some point it generated something that cost the business money. Happened to us. Direct root-cause analysis lead to ChatGPT generated code not being aware of the correct way to handle a transaction. First this took out stuff due to leaving transactions open. Then after that was fixed by someone who didn't know what they were doing, it turned out that the scope of the transaction was wrong which caused invisible data loss when a rollback occurred.

2. The free trial ended and no one wanted to pay for it.

I'm still here. GPT-4 (and now Claude 3.5 Sonnet) are still tools I use every day to help me write better code more productively.

https://simonwillison.net/series/using-llms/

The energy equation can be improved dramatically with tailor-made hardware. Bitcoin has showed how much was possible, these days using even the fastest gpu is totally unviable. Of course llm inference is much more complex but there's still much optimization to be had.

And 10$ isn't an awful lot of money to justify. It's like half an hour a month (and like a smoke break's worth of salary in silicon valley lol)

I think AI has its uses. I just think they are overblown and applied too widely. There's a few things it's really good at. And in those cases it will shine. The rest is hype.

I expect that silicon valley developers will indeed pay for some AI products long term. Some other professionals will too.

But, people are spending shocking sums on these products. They need to make a vast sum to pay back what they've spent, and that sort of income can't cover it.

I dunno. ChatGPT is still ridiculously good as a search engine. Learning a new language now is a completely different experience for me. I've recently found myself putting something into Google, realising there is nothing of value in the first page if results and taking my question to ChatGPT instead. It's answers might not be correct, and man is it confident about things it just made up, but it is still a much better experience than clicking though ad laden blogspam, forums and question boards to find the same information.

Yep, same. It’s a different world for using latex cause i can get it to spit out example code for all sorts of things.

$10 a month isn't a lot. Until you have 10,000 staff like us. That's $1.2m a year.

> Literally every AI thing I've seen people use has got an interest taper off way before the free trial even ends.

Midjourney, Suno, Copilot, ChatGPT, Jasper, Luma, etc would all like a word with you.

I think the real problem here is that the barrier of entry to start a new "AI thing" is so low, you're often flooded with subpar services that give more recency bias toward "every AI thing I've seen people use has got an interest taper off way before the free trial even ends".

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