Hacker News Reader

Comment by thraway3837 | Hacker News Reader

Good analysis. But who cares? It takes a long time for companies to figure out how to become profitable. And I honestly believe that OpenAI/Anthropic etc. have done humanity a huge favor. The money they're burning is not yours or mine. They're institutional investor money. So, again, who cares?

It will become profitable. Local models and local on-laptop inference will get good enough. This argument has been made for decades. It's not like everyone is walking around hosting email and photos on their personal machines. Sometimes it takes a large investment to make servers and clouds for this stuff possible.

We need to get away from this idea that in order for one thing to succeed, the other must fail. We also need to stop thinking in binary and accept that all these things (profitability, local models, powerful laptops, etc.) can all happily coexist.

View on HN

They haven't done humanity a favor at all. The innovation that these LLMs have produced has been small. A few fun math theorems where the answer was gleaned from a pattern in the training data. Great,.but it doesn't change the world one bit.

That latest drug for pancreatic cancer? Yeah, all human. After the trillions already spent, AI hasn't come up with any new medications, no new inventions to save lives... Nothing

We're only a few years into it, and yet all generations of folks are using it for all kinds of things and getting joy out of it. That's positive impact. Even folks outside of tech are having fun with it. That is a positive change for humanity. Similar to Radio, TV, smartphones, internet, microwaves and PCs.

It's already being used in the medical field in many different ways, and I believe it will be able to fold new proteins to help make new drugs. It's coming.

They already fold proteins with simulations.

Just because people are using it doesn't mean it's a net good. Lots of people use social media and that's just rotting brains and making people far more polarized than they ever were before.

It's use in medicine hasn't resulted in anything meaningful. Nobody's medical bill has gotten cheaper and nobody has lived longer or healthier because of anything AI did.

https://www.the-scientist.com/chatgpt-and-alphafold-help-des...

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15204

> They already fold proteins with simulations.

I like how you're trying to argue with the Nobel committee here.

Did you read it? It just said AI assisted with the process. So did the Internet. AI didn't come up with the solution or even the idea. It simply helped prune the search space, which is valuable, but not worth the trillions of dollars invested and all the added CO2.

> The money they're burning is not yours or mine. They're institutional investor money. So, again, who cares?

This is not happening in a vacuum. A lot of index funds and retirement accounts have bought into AI and AI adjacent companies, many with stakes in OpenAI. If OpenAI keels over, even when private, it will affect a lot of americans. If they IPO, it's even worse.

Index funds are based on a variety of tech stock. This whole "if they keel over" has been beaten to death ever since Tesla is surpassed Ford in market cap. And then Twitter was bought. No market crash. There will be some market corrections, but nothing be alarmed about.

Buyers of consumer storage, RAM, and GPUs care. People affected by the data center buildouts care. Workers losing jobs due to underpriced tokens care. People on the receiving end of AI slop care.

People aren't affected by PC component prices. The MacBook Neo was introduced and selling extraordinarily well for $500 during this component price crisis. 99% of the population isn't building their own PCs or smartphones.

People who don’t want Macs or who want more powerful hardware are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com