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Comment by zlkanter | Hacker News Reader

Amazon missed earnings and promptly doubled down on AI spending:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-plans-200b-ai-spending...

It is encouraging to see that investors are punishing what is the greatest misallocation of capital since the dotcom bubble. Investors have figured out that AI is limited to probabilistic and annoying chatbots that are for entertainment and for looking up trivia questions.

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I was disagreeing with just your last statement, but then I did a little research: about 80% of revenue is from chatbots and 20% from APIs. So +1 on your comment.

Bear with me here, I actually do have a point to make: I took my stepdaughter out for breakfast this morning. She is a financial wizard specializing in running large cities, and to explain to her the current craziness of overspending on AI infrastructure, I described "exponential spending increases for linear economic value increases." I may be wrong about this, but I am all for targeting the sweet spot of more efficient smaller AI models that are fit to purpose for specific use cases.

You're agreeing with GP but it's a flawed premise: a chatbot doesn't have to be limited to entertainment and trivia, as anyone who has used one for productivity knows.

Oh boy, are you going to be in for a rude awakening. Might I ask what is your exposure? Because this does not line up with what I am witnessing day to day at all.

This type of commentary reminds me of the people during the dot com boom who were adamant that e-commerce was all film flam and would never take off.

Consider that it is possible that both (1) we are in an investment bubble and (2) we are underestimating the long term impact of LLMs and perhaps mispredicting where they will land.

In what way is the long term impact of LLMs being underestimated? If anything, it seems that it has been overestimated in the past years and that something other than LLMs will be needed to reach the original scaled LLM hope of AGI.

Back when the Internet was America online and some CGI bin perl scripts, there were a lot of very lofty things said about the potential of the Internet in the future. I don’t remember any of them predicting the power of the tech would have over business, politics, media, and hours of every single day for billions of people. Even without AGI, it’s quite possible that were still underestimating. The effects of predictive, probabilistic computing 20 or 50 years from now.

The internet alone didnt change sh!t. Without smartphones, unified app stores, cellular network innovation et al internet traffic would not be so high.

Funny how people leave this stuff out. Yawn. Basic simpleton analysis and takes.

The Internet created the backbone that allowed for rapid experimentation in communications technologies, and created the ability for anyone to create and share technologies and reach a huge audience very quickly.

Without the Internet, most consumer electronics would have been far more expensive to build, and would have been strictly controlled walled gardens, but the Internet in general and the Web in particular allowed so many inventors to flourish. Ever since that Genie was let out of the bottle, corporate and government interests have been trying to put it back in, and most companies are trying to build and reinforce walled gardens under the banner of unified app stores that extract insane rents.

Wow this is like going on a medical forum and saying "medicine didn't change shit".

They were replying to this particular underestimation:

> AI is limited to probabilistic and annoying chatbots that are for entertainment and for looking up trivia questions.

That is not a rational assessment of the utility that the technology provides, even today.

By your logic the only way to achieve number 2 is to keep pumping number 1.

This type of commentary reminds of people propping up these LLM MLMs.

I know it feels comforting to say this, but deep down you have to realize that saying things confidently does not cause them to become true.

Was that comforting? At least the commentator came with a source

Theres a real problem with people who are too tech-induced: youre disconnected from how the average person interacts with stuff.

You’ll get downvoted for your second statement. I think investors are struggling to see how AI turns into more money for consumers if it. It’s one thing to exclaim how your productivity is up, but does that translate into more profit and larger customer base if you’re a business? I very much doubt consumers will pay more than dollars a month for an LLM and I also very much doubt the ad market can grow large enough to cover the spend on that (ad market is plenty big and driven by other economic factors)

Many people are spending significantly more time every day engaging with AI chatbots than they spend engaging with Google, and Google is one of the most valuable companies in the world.

I suppose people don’t realize how much of their day is actually engaging with Google through their trackers, their email, their phones, YouTube, etc.

By that exact logic Tiktok should be the most valuable company on the world, yet its not even in top 10. Attention doesn't automatically generate profit especially since most of these companies are yet to monetize attention. They are still burning billions and the public opinion on this outside of tech bubble is very negative. It wouldn't surprise me if the money on the internet falls to pre-2020 levels in next few years. Subscription pricing model is also becoming increasingly cumbersome for companies and individuals which is another worrying trend.

Yeah.... stick to conversations strictly re. technology pal.

If only that is what investors have figured out.

Unfortunately, it seems investors now think that all paid software will be replaced by AI generated software, somehow open source projects laundered through generative AI models should finally convince enterprise customers to go with free.

Why should anyone take your sensible first statement seriously if your second statement is so easily verifiably false?

Some of these AI critical posts really are an exercise in Gell Mann Amnesia, man.

Im still waiting to read about macro-level mass-lay offs or insane productivity leaps.

Where are the results, tell me? What insanely great products have been shipped by people leveraging/building on top of LLMs...?

Yeah, silence. As usual.

There's literally a billion ChatGPT users already, the worlds fastest growing product. Do you think they're all just playing around in the sand? Ask anyone in education, it has completely upended every student's workflow.

Just because people aren’t talking about how LLMs are boosting their productivity to ship “insanely great” products doesn’t mean it’s not happening. I don’t talk about every tool I use, and neither do many of the best teams who keep their eyes on the prize and relentlessly ship.

Meanwhile this story just came out: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/claude-code-is-the-inf...

You can find posts on this site every day with people say they're seeing big productivity gains.

I'm sure they'll all lying though, right?

Or, because it hasn't solved all of the world's problems yet then I guess it doesn't count?

Maybe you're the one overhyping AI.

I think their point was: at this point we should see clear macro effects. There should be new software that wasn't possible yesterday (or feasible, etc). Something big and new, and high quality.

AI helps me too, and I feel like I ship more now. But what if it's just a feeling and I'm not doing anything groundbreaking? What if I'm just doing what I've always done but at slighly more speed?

> There should be new software that wasn't possible yesterday

This is exactly the overhyping the critics are continuing to strawman their complaints with.

Speaking for myself, I think AI is better than the average dev. And yes I think it is affecting hiring.

But this is very different from saying I think it will do new things that weren't possible yesterday.

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