> but the whole gang of frontier labs, breastfed with a mix of VC money and pension funds from the average Joe, is being pressured by Chinese lab
Can you point to data that suggests rate of token revenue growth is slowing ? This announcement, and the price cuts from openai are hints in the direction of pressure from open weights models but not conclusive.
> AI is largely automating the most tractable parts of science rather than expanding its frontiers
By definition, creativity cannot be automated, and AI is a fantastic automation machine. It can explore thinking paths at a rate humans cannot match. But creativity is bringing the unthinkable into the thinkable, and that requires sensory experience [1]. Specifically, new definitions and symbols which never existed before. Imagine the concept vector space, and expanding that with new independent dimensions. Is that even possible ? When you look at history the answer is yes !. And each time there was an independent dimension added, it was an act of genius. It is an instructive exercise to name these moments in history where an independent dimension was added to human thought. Some examples in math would be the invention of a number, and in politics could be the idea of democracy. By contrast, LLMs are trapped in the vector space they are trained on, and they lack the feedback loop with sensory experience to be able to create and validate theories.
> For almost everything else, the answer is no. No one else would pay the real costs to run them. It'll require the whole industry to shrink down massively compared to what we're seeing now - down to a profitable (and much smaller) core.
If there is any data to support this, please share.
Circular financing is a dead horse - dont beat it. Instead, what is more interesting could be: Is there a path to these builds becoming economically profitable ? Towards this, some metrics to watch are: 1) ROI per token per dollar 2) Enterprise token budgets. And at what point there is an overbuild relative to the token roi. Alternatively, pressure on token costs due to the open weights models etc.
> All these "rewritten in rust" projects only reinforce the idea that a significant part of the rust community consists of software talibans and not of engineers who must deliver something that works and is reliable over time.
Nailed it ! There are some folks who behave holier-than-thou just because they happen to use some language. Language missionaries if you will, and they are insufferable.
yea, I found LLMs poor at reasoning through system-wide behaviors. Good luck to the vibers when they try to rootcause a rare data-corruption problem. They will hand it off to fable which will attempt trial-and-error bug fixes which will eventually muck up the code. What happens then ?
Doesnt this prove that there is really no moat in proprietary models for coding usecases, or the gaps is narrowing ? Also, since GLM5.2 can be run equally on amd and nvda, I guess there is no hw moat either. Further, switching costs for users is minimal not only in agents but models too. So there is really no stickiness or user preference involved. For this usecase I think it is a race to the bottom for costs in a good way for developers.
The bigger story here is that the AI agents were not effective. This is a huge admission and explains why Anthropic, OpenAI, and now Microsoft are creating giant teams of FDEs (forward deployed engineers). It ties in with Meta becoming a GPU cloud to sell "excess AI compute". xai and now meta renting excess AI compute and shovel-vendors are trying to keep the embers alive with free tokens in a last-ditch effort.
> fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing
There is a lot of dumb money chasing the AI dream. That money is not asking hard questions about return on investment yet. But, the narrative is starting to shift as evidenced by this article. Even Meta is questioning the value of AI Agents.
In response, we see Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft creating giant teams of FDEs (forward deployed engineers). The idea is to keep the AI dream alive one way or another because once that dies, the whole thing comes crashing down. So, dumb money is going to put up a strong fight in the marketing-sphere, and articles like these are needed to counter that.
> The value is in the feeling of euphoria you get when dominating the other person by being unequivocally right
Frequently accompanied by a feeling of despair when you are dominated by another.
> The fact that this thread even exists speaks to the fact of the extremely high survival benefit this behavior confers onto a human.
Dialog brings clarity. Clarity helps build tools. Tools help survival. So, if there is anything to seek, try clarity of understanding - not being right, and being right stands in the way of understanding.
It takes 10x more effort to refute BS than to generate it. Reviewing code is refuting. So is verifying the correctness of propositions. Generating propositions is easy, Refuting it requires proving the truth value or finding contradiction.
For maintainers of open source whose time is scarce, their energies are wasted needlessly, and I am all for conserving and directing energies productively.
> if it runs, it runs, regardless of who or what made it.
If it fails to run who is responsible to fix ? Problem with AI is that it does not have causal-models of how something works, and the reason for that is that it doesnt interact with the world. I think of it as an armchair expert who spouts recommendations without having a grounded understanding in the real world.
This is how overcapacity happens in a commodity. The is a rush to expand capacity to meet demand, and there will be overshoot. I hope these factories are built quickly so the memory crunch eases.
I like that the invisible hand of market is slapping the Mag-7 for capex which is the only way to discipline them. Investors are waking up to say: hey, you are spending all your profits on data-centers, where is the return for me ? But, it surprises me that there are vast pools of capital which we collectively call the "market" that makes these calculations, or maybe a simpler causal explanation is the missing stock repurchase bid. At some point, one of the hyperscalers (msft ?) will break from the pack and announce reductions to capex and increase stock repurchases to stem the decline.
Loved Bessis's book and his writings because of his human-centric view which is missed by the ai maximalists. I just cant wait for the upcoming AI bust to skim the froth in the debate.
Can you point to data that suggests rate of token revenue growth is slowing ? This announcement, and the price cuts from openai are hints in the direction of pressure from open weights models but not conclusive.