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Comment by ctoth | Hacker News Reader

> But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year

You could not have bought Claude Opus 4.5 at any price one year ago I'm quite certain. The things that were available cost half of what they did then, and there are new things available. These are both true.

I'm agreeing with you, to be clear.

There are two pieces I expect to continue: inference for existing models will continue to get cheaper. Models will continue to get better.

Three things, actually.

The "hitting a wall" / "plateau" people will continue to be loud and wrong. Just as they have been since 2018[0].

[0]: https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2018/09/a-critical-appraisal-...

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As a user of LLMs since GPT-3 there was noticeable stagnation in LLM utility after the release of GPT-4. But it seems the RLHF, tool calling, and UI have all come together in the last 12 months. I used to wonder what fools could be finding them so useful to claim a 10x multiplier - even as a user myself. These days I’m feeling more and more efficiency gains with Claude Code.

That's the thing people are missing, the models plateaued a while ago, still making minor gains to this day, but not huge ones. The difference is now we've had time to figure out the tooling. I think there's still a ton of ground to cover there and maybe the models will improve given that the extra time, but I think it's foolish to consider people who predicted that completely wrong. There are also a lot of mathematical concerns that will cause problems in the near and distant future. Infinite progress is far from a given, we're already way behind where all the boosters thought we'd be my now.

I believe Sam Altman, perhaps the greatest grifter in today’s Silicon Valley, claimed that software engineering would be obsolete by the end of last year.

> The "hitting a wall" / "plateau" people will continue to be loud and wrong. Just as they have been since 2018[0].

Everybody who bet against Moore's Law was wrong ... until they weren't.

And AI is the reaction to Moore's Law having broken. Nobody gave one iota of damn about trying to make programming easier until the chips couldn't double in speed anymore.

This is exactly backwards: Dennard scaling stopped. Moore’s Law has continued and it’s what made training and running inference on these models practical at interactive timescales.

You are technically correct. The best kind of correct.

However, most people don't know the difference between the proper Moore's Law scaling (the cost of a transistor halves every 2 years) which is still continuing (sort of) and the colloquial version (the speed of a transistor doubles every 2 years) which got broken when Dennard scaling ran out. To them, Moore's Law just broke.

Nevertheless, you are reinforcing my point. Nobody gave a damn about improving the "programming" side of things until the hardware side stopped speeding up.

And rather than try to apply some human brainpower to fix the "programming" side, they threw a hideous number of those free (except for the electricity--but we don't mention that--LOL) transistors at the wall to create a broken, buggy, unpredictable machine simulacrum of a "programmer".

(Side note: And to be fair, it looks like even the strong form of Moore's Law is finally slowing down, too)

If you can turn a few dollars of electricity per hour into a junior-level programmer who never gets bored, tired, or needs breaks, that fundamentally changes the economics of information technology.

And in fact, the agentic looped LLMs are executing much better than that today. They could stop advancing right now and still be revolutionary.

interesting post. i wonder if these people go back and introspect on how incorrect they have been? do they feel the need to address it?

No, people do not do that.

This is harmless when it comes to tech opinions but causes real damage in politics and activism.

People get really attached to ideals and ideas, and keep sticking to those after they fail to work again and again.

i don't think it is harmless or we are incentivising people to just say whatever they want without any care for truth. people's reputations should be attached to their predictions.

Some people definitely do but how do they go and address it? A fresh example in that it addresses pure misinformation. I just screwed up and told some neighbors garbage collection was delayed for a day because of almost 2ft of snow. Turns out it was just food waste and I was distracted checking the app and read the notification poorly.

I went back to tell them (do not know them at all just everyone is chattier digging out of a storm) and they were not there. Feel terrible and no real viable remedy. Hope they check themselves and realize I am an idiot. Even harder on the internet.

Do _you_ do that?

i try to yes

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