The pushback I see everywhere outside of tech suggests the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest. The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet as much as it likes to think it does.
Hiring an engineer to finetooth comb blueprints for mistakes before construction will take nearly as much time as having an engineer draft them themselves. And they will be smart enough to not do something silly like putting the electrical panel on the back of the shower wall. If you just vibecode some blueprints and start construction without the comb you could lose way more than you saved with something as simple as pouring a support pillar or building a wall 2 inches off and having to tear it out later and rebuild.
Whether the value attached to these companies is grounded in reality is a different question.
It's passed person to person over long periods of time.
And you can't train an LLM on that.
If the datasheet is only a few pages I'll read it myself :).
I think the trouble, economically speaking, is that while it will be possible from a purely technical standpoint to unbundle a job performed by a human into separate tasks, many of which can be "done" by agents, the new process will not present a cost savings overall once the entire lifecycle of the task is taken into account. The economist David Autor has written about these challenges extensively, and his theory accords with my experiences.
Nor do they ever consider that the cost of datacenter hosted inference has to crash when the bubble pops and hardware vendors can't fill orders at sky high prices created by demand anymore and the hyperscalers can't keep things running near capacity at the high demand prices.
All of which leads to the ROI math for implementing AI looking much different.
Has everybody forgotten how much money Nvidia, TSMC, and all the hyperscalers are making, today, in pure profit? The costs of inference are high because we're in a bubble.
Any economic model that I've seen leads to failure. The only reason it's popular now is that numbers are going up. People are just edging it.
We were just keeping the unemployment figures down.
Also look at the large tech companies. Same story.
Capital is simply going from bubble to bubble to pop. It was NFTs and Web3, then the metaverse, now it's AI. You need a new speculative product, market demand be damned. Ultimately the tech itself is inconsequential. Sure, AI is somehow more useful than an hashed png picture of a monkey smoking a joint, but the AI frenzy would've happened anyway.
I can imagine some other alternate universe where it's the turn of something already commonplace instead, like cloud computing; and the same CEOs who are screaming right now that we need to burn the ecosystem to build their new AI data centers would've told us that "The Cloud is inevitable", and that we need to spend 80% of the GDP to finance their AWS competitors.
While some weather obsessed people will bemoan the difference between various data providers, most people just see the weather and don't know or care how the data gets there.
With the new Siri that's rolling out, I don't think most users would know or care if it was using Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, or even xAI on the backend. It's mostly trivia when they're all reasonably capable.
The most AI usage I've seen from my wife and family is when they take pictures of our/their lawns and houses, then use ChatGPT to reimagine them with different landscaping ideas or paint trims.
Like so many things popular on HN, the tools that are here are great aids for good development processes and practitioners... but they are not actually replacing them in applications that will exist after the AI bubble deflates.
- consider that right now autonomous drones operate in Ukraine using the latest and greatest frontier models
- consider that fascist or authoritarian governments will now have a kind of access to their citizenry’s deeply personal lives that they’ve only dreamed about before. “Show me everyone who has insulted me” is now feasible to do at scale, today. A system that can monitor, in real time, a global sigint network on every single person equivalent or better than having a dedicated person or team of people monitoring them. Every home has microphones, every square inch of street has satellite imagery, security cameras, etc.
Now, given today where we are: what do we do? Do we regulate ourselves into a situation where people feel better about things like data center construction but that impact our ability to compete, ceding these technologies to other countries that would gain an incredible amount of leverage and power over us? Do we continue unabated, damaging communities and industries in a fervor to be at the top that later down the road we realize is not worth the tradeoff?
link? Seems infeasible from a latency standpoint.
The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.
Maybe, but it's also pretty clear that the entire purpose and intent of delivering "AI" to the economy is to wholly wipe out labor. Do I think that's realistic? No. SpaceX's total addressable market (TAM) in their S-1 filing to go public stated as much. Their TAM is $28.5T(!) with $26.5T of it being AI. That's larger than the US GDP (~$24T). You can only throw numbers like that around if you're explicitly aiming to replace labor, no matter how realistic it is.
Personally, I'm tired of mediocre people who've attained some amount of business success turning around and trying to dismantle democratic systems because it's incompatible with their world view.
It's more than reasonable to complain about these things night and day. The alternative to vocal complaints won't be pretty.
I honestly don't think writers have much of a say regarding what they write. The tone is set top down.
But given that most people hate AI it's a polarizing topic to write about, they have incentives to poor some oil, for sure.
Fine by me, AI is an anti-human technology.
That sounds literally insane to me. This is not coming from the media, many of the same people that own the media have a vested interest in this particular US political administration... which is also basically all of big tech.
You should change the world by playing chess, not creating a new game and shitting on everyone playing the old one.
My only objective is doing damage it to it before it kills our pensions and 401k's etc.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4921196/#:~:text=A%...
>The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet
Of course they don't, but they are still allowed to make a product, and pivot if there's no consumer demand. However there is huge consumer and business demand for AI so they are justified in making the investments they are.
It is not ok to lobby and manipulate governments for fiscal policy changes to write off the costs and risks on the general public.
We MUST be entirely insulated from their failure as society. If they can't raise the capital for the product then they should fail quietly and insignificantly which is not what is going to happen at the moment.
Right now they have to lobby and manipulate the government just to keep from being shut down on a mad king's whim. A mad king elected and re-elected by the same morons who now demand a say in how AI is built and used. No, thanks.
Government is not the solution. Government is the problem. The Republicans told us that, and they were right, just not in the way they meant.
No sympathy!
Right now Sam Altman is sitting at Trump's literal right hand, while Amodei is exiled to the kids' table: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1u8gg19/anthrop...
>It is not ok to lobby and manipulate governments for fiscal policy changes to write off the costs and risks on the general public.
How are they doing this? What are you referring to?
Citation needed. Most people use it once a while but not daily; they tried it once and played a bit with it but then forgot about it because it’s not clear what they should use it for.
This is very basic in technology products.
It is very easy to say that Gmail AI product has 1.8 Billion users because there are about 1.8 Billion Gmail accounts/users and they have absolutely no way of completely opting out. (opting out without the company punishing users by taking away important features)
A simple A/B Test with just 50,000 or 100,000 users depending on the product will give everyone the REAL picture of where users stand.
You should consider that the industry is just lying to make everyone believe that everyone else is interested. Creating a sense of inevitability. It's the same trick that every ad out there uses, selling you a profitable fantasy as reality.