Edit: I forgot HN strips emojis.
I wonder for how long this will keep working. Can't be too hard to prompt an AI to avoid "tells" like this one...
People who put the effort into checking the output aren't necessarily checking more than style, but some of them will, so it will still help.
Biggest one in this case, in my opinion: it's an extremely long article with awkward section headers every few paragraphs. I find that any use of "The ___ Problem" or "The ___ Lesson" for a section header is especially glaring. Or more generally, many superfluous section headers of the form "The [oddly-constructed noun phrase]". I mean, googling "The Fire-Retardant Giants" literally only returns this specific article.
Or another one here: the historic stock price data is slightly wrong. For whatever reason, LLMs seem to make mistakes with that often, perhaps due to operating on downsampled data. The initial red-flag here is the first table claims Apple's split-adjusted peak close in 2000 was exactly $1.00.
There are plenty of issues with the accuracy of the written content as well, but it's not worth getting into.
No, no, no! Stop that! The em dash is an wonderful little punctuation mark that's damned useful when used with purpose. You can't turn it into some scarlet glyph just because normal people finally noticed they exist. LLMs use them because we used them, damn it.
For god's sake, are we supposed to go back to the dark ages of the double hyphen like typographic barbarians in the hopes that a future update won't ruin that, too? After all the work to get text editors to automatically substitute them in the first place?
What's funny is that, when people first started noticing that LLMs tended to like the em dash, I'd mentioned to a friend that I hoped—rather naively—it might lead to a resurgence and people would think to themselves "huh, that looks pretty useful." Needless to say, I got that one wrong. Are we really going to sacrifice the poor em dash just because people can't come up with a better signifier for LLM text?
It's more things like AI delivering pizza that's under threat. You know, the actual value.
It seems like right now the most rational move to stay in the industry is to milk the AI wave as much as possible, learn all of the tools, get a big brand name on one's resume, and then land somewhere still-alive once the AI music stops? But ultimately if nothing outside of AI is growing, it's one big game of musical chairs and even that might not save you?
SV & big tech engineer money.
Majority of engineering fields do not make that kind of money to retire at 50. Comfortable compared to the rest of the country, sure.
My plan as someone who was thinking of leaving tech anyway (remote work is not for me, and practically any new tech job I get will be at least as remote as this one has become if not more so, and I want to program not manage programmers, artificial or otherwise) is to stay where I am pushing through to the other side if possible and if not, I'll find myself redundant. At that point I'll end up on a lower wage doing something else from the ground up, but if LLMs are going to be what we are told they are programming will become a minimum wage job for most anyway. Either way, sticking where I am for now, tightening the purse strings a bit, saving as much as I can, is the best course of action.
Unless you're working very obviously outside the blast radius of an AI-bubble correction (you'd know if you were) or are a very high-value VIP (again, you'd know), you should assume you'll be spending some time without a job within the next few years. Possibly a long time.
You might get lucky, but it's not really going to be in your control and "milking the AI wave, learning all the tools" isn't going to change your odds much. It really is musical chairs. Whether you lose your job will depend on where you happen to be standing when the music stops. And there are going to be so many other people looking for the same new chair as you, with resumes that look almost exactly like yours, that getting a new job will basically come down to a lottery draw.
If you think the AI stuff is cool, study it and play with it. Otherwise, just save money and start working on the outline for that novel you've been thinking about writing.
Tech and software's investment balance sheet comes down to a largely fixed cost of development vs. a large customer base where every customer has little to no additional cost.
If you manage to burn the bridges or at least scare hundreds of millions of those people into exploring alternatives, that really eats into your total target market in the long run.
Is the return measurable and immediate?
Is it really?
Dentists offices that only need 1 receptionist instead of 2.
A dramatic reduction in front line tier 1 customer support reps.
Translation teams laid off.
Documentation teams dramatically reduced.
Data entry teams replaced by vision models.
Out of the things you listed the only ones that seem plausible are translation team and data entry team, though even there, I'd want humans to deslop the output.
They're saving pennies but at what cost?
The chatbot, acting as my agent, whether on the website on on a call doesn't have more permissions than I have.
Today they are a durable asset functionally, longer than they are economically. So there is no reason in a market with less demand, that their economic payback windows cannot be extended further into their functional lifetimes.
There will be energy cost incentives to replace GPUs. But turnover can respond sensibly to demand as it revives, while older GPUs continue working.
Also, the data centers themselves, and especially any associated increase in power generation, will carry forward as long term functional value.
I doubt any downturn in compute demand lasts long. The underlying trend, aside from AI, was for steady increases in demand. Regardless of bad AI business models, or investment overhangs, a greater focus by more entities on AI product-market fits, along with cheaper compute, will quickly soak up cycles in new and better ways.
The wildflowers will grow fast.
their huge customers will be able to produce ASICs hat will be faster and cheaper to operate than their GPUs
jensen has to be the luckiest man in the world, first crypto, now "AI"
Why? NVIDIA is better positioned to produce faster and more efficient ML ASICs any of their huge customers (except possibly Google). And on top of that, the fact that there is a huge library of CUDA code that will run out of the box on NVIDIA hardware is a big advantage.
Arguably, this shift has already happened. Modern NVIDIA datacenter GPUs, like the H100, only bear a passing resemblance to a GPU -- most of the silicon is dedicated to accelerating ML workloads.
As a possibility for example I can see them transforming from a GPU based corp into a parent company for many full or partially owned "subsidiaries". They still manufacture chips to be "vertically integrated" but that becomes bread and butter as an enablement rather than the main story (e.g. Google TPU's). As their margins go down the value accrues to what they are owning (the business units/product areas).
Are we sure this will be the case? Perhaps the sweet spot for hardware that can train/run language models is the GPU already, especially with the years of head start Nvidia has?
Meanwhile, 67% of my time is gone fixing autocorrect on apple devices.
You: No one knows anything AI helps with.
Yeah, okay, if you ignore everything every user says then it is indeed a mystery.
The only thing I trust about these right now is my own experience
The only real difference this time around is all of the datacenters being built. There's real hard asset costs making it much riskier and capital intensive.
Sure, there might be hundreds or thousands of small startups in the AI game, and some are probably as viable as the fabled Pets.com. But even if they all crash and burn, it's going to be a rounding error compared to the 7 companies I mentioned above. The AI will be alive and kicking, and nobody will even notice.
The companies that are sustainable with their own revenue, covering their runway or nearly there, are likely to be alive if there’s not investors to keep them alive. Those with ridiculous commitments expecting a hail mary until their business model materializes, are living on borrowed time
I think the best metaphor will be the California gold rush. There is definitely gold there but most of it has already been mined. The people who are entering at this point are woefully unprepared, assuming that they can vibe their way into a fortune, when the rest of the gold requires hard earned labor.
Gold, tulips, real estate, rail, witch hunts, satanic panic..
We shouldn't be worried because "this time it is different".
"AI" is none of those things. It is "totally different this time". "AI" is going to do all the work for us, we are all going to get UBI then at some point as it grows the "ASI" is going to either figure out how to grant us immortality or cause mass human genocide.
It is all completely rational this time.
I don't see those companies promising that. They are bragging about being able to replace jobs for millions people and their CEOs are also simultaneously taking pretty dismissive attitude toward lesser people. If is more of "we will replace millions of people of eff you, billionaire class will become more powerful.
I am not saying it will realistically happen, I am saying that is what current messaging is.
Har not to see parallels with the current AI bubble.
But that was the same thought for me. The other totally missed aspect: a fire kills all life in area.
This is flat out wrong.
I think a huge breakthrough for AI was priced in, and we are still waiting to find out if it will come and what it'll be.
Personally, as this article seems investment focused, I see no downside to diversifying away into more varied kind of investments, but then again, I'm not a pro, so take it with a grain of salt..
Interestingly this time around I could see the 'fire' affecting mid-large corporations (or at least some divisions of them) if they don't adapt. Adobe, being heavily focused on graphic design seems like it could be under pressure. Low-end consulting / outsourcing is largely doing the same work AI is good at. Similarly with technical gig-work (like Upwork).
They have no business case - they are 'burn money and hope AI allows us to build something we can monetise'. That's not a business model.
This list of companies made me wonder a bit. Technical progress has been huge, no question about that. But as for the actual quality or experience for the user/customer - I have the impression everything got worse, starting from Google from the first wave.
Then the cycle is broken, and there might be no survivors, or the regrowth may be so far into the future that it will make no difference for most of the survivors.
This is only because businesses are full of folks with short-sighted FOMO desperately trying to cram AI features into any product they can. AI is the new digital clock.
We've put so many layers between the engineers and customers and diluted any accountability to demonstrate positive ROI—even if it's theoretical—that we do pointless work for nobody. I'm not going to complain too much personally because all those layers make it possible for me to just pull cards and collect a paycheck but I'm surprised nobody on the business side even somewhat cares if the work they're paying for is worthwhile.
If anything, you should accuse them of foolhardy recklessness. They are not the sticks in the mud.
I think that is the recklessness in question. Throw in that there is no profit for OpenAI & co and that everything is fueled by debt and the picture is grim (IMHO)
That's a nice crystal ball you have there. From where I'm standing, model performance improvements have been slowing down for a while now, and without some sort of fundamental breakthrough, I don't see where the business value is going to come from
The key is for them to build before the money runs out--I'm not sure they will have enough time.
Musk is planning for 1 megaton/year of satellites, each with 100kW, yielding about 100GW per year.[1]
He thinks they can do that in 4 years, but adjusting for Elon-time, it's probably no less than 8 years, if ever.
But will the AI money last that long? Maybe not.
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Man that is the question, isn't it
The GFC doesn't have anything in common with the .com bubble, maybe we'd have see another tech bubble in the first 2010s if there were not a GFC, but it's fundamentally wrong to place those 2 things nearby.
It is not that simple. You need to consider factors outside of the silicon valley, outside of USA, outside of technology business. There is lot of world out there. These analogies and predictions don't come out into the global scene to have a look at the what's going on across the globe.
The bubbles which happened earlier are not insulated phenomena that happened in silicon valley labs. It is a complex interaction between various forces.
For example, social and political norms may turn against all that is AI. Any AI-enabled service or product might be seen as serving plastic food.
This is some of the most nihilistic thinking I've read linked from this site. Also it lacks the nuance that when brush is left to accumulate over due years of forest mismanagement, the resulting wild-fires are much worse and unnecessarily destructive in ways that are hardly describable as "ecosystem health."
I note your AI missed the crypto hypecycle. Maybe because it really was a bubble.
It is not a bubble. It is not a fire ( cleansing or otherwise ). It is, however, a piece of technology that is, misguidedly, plopped hard into everything without regard for what it is actually good at. This is why I despair when I see AI in notepad or "ai protects okta'.
I am concerned, because I do see a big change on the horizon coming, but it is not the change that is being presented. It may not be the feared ai/agi/asi ( depending on one's particular bent ),but rather deep re-entrenchment of existing ecosystems in ways that will make things a lot more difficult overall.
Here is what I mean by this:
- the internet as we once knew it, is effectively dead - the ones who can ( money-wise and knowledge-wise ) and see the need to, move behind local networks - those that can't ( money-wise, knowledge-wise, or circle-wise ), are forced into locked systems that effectively become AML for... anything ( and if you did not experience it yet, I am assuming you did yet try to buy anything that has -- lets call it -- dual use )
It is bifurcation ( or what some media call k-shaped these days ), but it is not a fire at all. If anything, these are very, very aggressive vines.
Maybe it's simply less visible?
I have no account at any of the social media giants (except HN but I think that does not count). I mostly use the Fediverse and specialized forums. I would argue that it feels similar to the "old" internet.
"AI" hardly has any working products. Vibe coding is foisted upon companies by CEOs who want to promote their friends' products or who want to use it as an excuse for firing people or who have circular revenue agreements with other companies.
This is like the housing bubble of 2008 which was based on hot air and incorrect algorithms.
They can write it off and move on to other things. But that is not what the new wildfire talking point says. The wildfire framing says that the underlying tech is as valuable as the tech of 2000 was.
I wasn't a fan of any Microsoft products at the time, though Excel was pretty good when I started using it heavily a few years later.
