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Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

People enjoy the narrative that AI is doomed. I am in the same mindset as you. I cannot see compute demand changing anytime soon.

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But the incentive to produce that intelligence is so high, that many opportunities become practical to explore. And many of them show doing AI inference workloads at 1000x cheaper and with 1000x less power, and sometimes 1000x faster.

If any one of these happens, or two, or all three, then the loans for trillions will become worthless while the use of AI can explode. The relationship between cost and ai intelligence output need not be linear over time, which is absolutely what the people financing are assuming.

Personally, I think linear over 5 years is about right, but no longer than that.

This is an interesting angle, and one I hadn't considered before. Would it be overly cynically to draw a line between it and the recent willingness [1] of many on the frontier to support some sort of coordinated pause or slowdown? I think that proposal has genuine value on its own merits, but it might also give a lot of overly-optimistic financing a chance to pay off before cheaper inference crashes the market.

[1] https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/

Yes, but to walk in to the market late, and not have all that debt, it will be too much of an opportunity for an aspiring company.

Google was not the first search engine. But in a way, it was the last.

This is a straw man position. Who is saying AI is doomed? There were previous winters but the technology kept improving. What people are doubting is all the current hype around it. Stuff like AGI and the singularity being right around the corner with fully automated societies and robots dong all your chores for you.

Rather than it being presented as productivity tool for enhancing human labor and activity, it's presented as an eventual god that will radically transform the rules of economics and everything else, and thus it needs to be forced into everything. That's absurd hype and with it all the absurd VC funding and valuation. Thus it's seen as a huge financial bubble.

> robots dong all your chores for you

This could happen this year or next, assuming you're willing to pay $30k for the hardware.

> the current hype around it.

- Fable

- Seedance

- Nano Banana / GPT Image

- Kimi

- ChatGPT

These tools are 80-90% of my day now.

Google Search? Meh. Chrome? Eh. Mac or Linux? Honestly just input devices now.

The models are the hottest thing in the world.

I am getting so much done. If I told myself from two years ago the progress these models would have made, I wouldn't have believed it.

You’re arguing against claims I never made. You can reject AGI hype and still believe AI demand, infrastructure buildout, and commercial adoption will continue growing.

Absolutely lots of hype but there is lots of value behind generated (unlike crypto) and we are still very early. This is what I was pointing at. There are folks on very extreme both sides, you are a good example, and I happen to believe it’s probably somewhere in the middle.

More precisely the mismatch in investment and debt and timelines. The people laid the fiber (if that is even an apt description) were not the ones who made money from that investment. If there is even some sort of mismatch in the investment timeline then that could mean all the current investors are wiped out and someone else will eventually profit from their work.

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