Interesting take but too bearish on LLMs in my opinion.
LLMs have already found large-scale usage (deep research, translation) which makes them more ubiquitous today than 3D printers ever will or could have been.
LLMs have already found large-scale usage (deep research, translation) which makes them more ubiquitous today than 3D printers ever will or could have been.
This isn't (intentionally at least) mere HN pedantry: they really do act like translation tools in a bunch of observable ways.
And while they have recently crossed the threshold into "yeah, I'm always going to have a gptel buffer open now" territory at the extreme high end, their utility outside of the really specific, totally non-generalizing code lookup gizmo usecase remains a claim unsupported by robust profits.
There is a hole in the ground where something between 100 billion and a trillion dollars in the ground that so far has about 20B in revenue (not profit) going into it annually.
AI is going to be big (it was big ten years ago).
LLMs? Look more and more like the Metaverse every day as concerns the economics.
This is a concern for me. I'm using claude-code daily and find it very useful, but I'm expecting the price to continue getting jacked up. I do want to support Anthropic, but they might eventually need to cross a price threshold where I bail. We'll see.
I expect at some point the more open models and tools will catch up when the expensive models like ChatGPT plateau (assuming they do plateau). Then we'll find out if these valuations measure up to reality.
Note to the Hypelords: It's not perfect. I need to read every change and intervene often enough. "Vibe coding" is nonsense as expected. It is definitely good though.
You don't stock antibiotics and bullets in a survival compound because you think that's going to keep out a paperclip optimizer gone awry. You do that in the forlorn hope that when the guillotines come out that you'll be able to ride it out until the Nouveau Regime is in a negotiating mood. But they never are.
- Is your demand inelastic at that point, if having claude-code becomes effectively required, to sustain your livelihood? Does pricing continue to increase, until it's 1%/5%/20%/50% of your salary (because hey, what's the alternative? if you don't pay, then you won't keep up with other engineers and will just lose your job completely)?
- But if tools like claude-code become such a necessity, wouldn't enterprises be the ones paying? Maybe, but maybe like health-insurance in America (a uniquely dystopian thing), your employer may pay some portion of the premiums, but they'll also pass some costs to you as the employee... Tech salaries have been cushy for a while now, but we might be entering a "K-shaped" inflection point --> if you are an OpenAI elite researcher, then you might get a $100M+ offer from Meta; but if you are an average dev doing average enterprise CRUD, maybe your wages will be suppressed because the small cabal of LLM providers can raise prices and your company HAS to pay, which means you HAVE to bear the cost (or else what? you can quit and look for another job, but who's hiring?)
This is a pessimistic take of course (and vastly oversimplified / too cynical). A more positive outcome might be, that increasing quality of AI/LLM options leads to a democratization of talent, or a blossoming of "solo unicorns"... personally I have toyed with calling this, something like a "techno-Amish utopia", in the sense that Amish people believe in self-sufficiency and are not wholly-resistant to technology (it's actually quite clever, what sorts of technology they allow for themselves or not), so what if we could take that further?
If there was a version of that Amish-mentality of loosely-federated self-sufficient communities (they have newsletters! they travel to each other! but they largely feed themselves, build their own tools, fix their own fences, etc.!), where engineers + their chosen LLM partner could launch companies from home, manage their home automation / security tech, run a high-tech small farm, live off-grid from cheap solar, use excess electricity to Bitcoin mine if they choose to, etc.... maybe there is actually a libertarian world that can arise, where we are no longer as dependent on large institutions to marshal resources, deploy capital, scale production, etc., if some of those things are more in-reach for regular people in smaller communities, assisted by AI. This of course assumes that, the cabal of LLM model creators can be broken, that you don't need to pay for Claude if the cheaper open-source-ish Llama-like alternative is good enough
As usual, the answer is "it depends". I guarantee though that I'll at least start looking at alternatives when there's a huge price hike.
Also I suspect that a 100x improvement (if even possible) wouldn't just cost 100 times as much, but probably 100,000+ times as much. I also suspect than an improvement of 100x will be hyped as an improvement of 1,000x at least :)
Regardless, AI is really looking like a commodity to me. While I'm thankful for all the investment that got us here, I doubt anyone investing this late in the game at these inflated numbers are going to see a long term return (other than ponzi selling).
ChatGPT has 800M+ weekly active users how is that comparable to the Metaverse in any way?
You can just see the scene from the Sorkin film where Fidji is saying to Altman: "Its time to monetize the site."
"We don't even know what it is yet, we know that it is cool."
In this case though I think the ChatGPT product line is profitable albeit not enough to cover the R&D costs of OpenAI.
No you can't, be serious. 10% of the global population is using their service, you can't just pretend that isn't impressive.
There are a lot of free websites, they do not have 800M users.
One could have said the same thing about Google in 2006
I assume there are massive number of LLM analysis pipelines out there.
I suppose it depends if you consider non determinist DS/ML pipelines "loadbearing" or not. Most are not using LLMs though.
3D parts regularly are used beyond prototyping though as tooling for a small company can be higher than just metal 3D parts. So I do somewhat agree but the loss of productivity in software prototyping would be a massive hit if LLMs vanished.
I don’t want to sound like a hard-core LLM believer. I get your point and it’s fair.
I just wanted to point out that the current usage of chatgpt is a lot broader than that of 3D printers even at the peak hype of it.
And I mean random people, not tech circles
It’s very different from NFTs in that respect
Everybody under a certain age is using ChatGPT, where they were once using search and friendship/expertises. It’s the number 1 app in the App Store. Copilot use in the enterprise is so seamless, you just talk to PowerPoint or outlook and it formulated what you were supposed to make or write.
It’s not a fad, it is a paradigm change.
People don’t need to understand how it works for it to work.
When I checked the iOS App Store just now, something called Love Island USA is the #1 free app. Kinda makes you think….
A little surprised to see Threads at 4 though.
Maybe if the AI companies start offering refunds for wrong answers, then the price per token might not be such a scam.
NFTs are about as close to literally useless as it gets, and that was always obvious; 99% of the serious attention paid to them came from hustlers and speculators.
LLMs, for all their limitations, are already good at some things and useful in some ways. Even in the areas where they are (so far) too unreliable for serious use, they're not pure hype and bullshit; they're doing things that would have seemed like magic 10 years ago.