undefined | Better HN

0 pointsstrange_quark2mo ago0 comments

> You and I need to learn to let it go.

Definitely, it’s an unhealthy fixation.

> I'm sorry to tell anyone who's reading this with a differing opinion, but if AI agents have proven revolutionary to your job, you produced nothing of actual value for the world before their advent, and still don't.

I agree with this, but I think my take on it is a lot less nihilistic than yours. I think people vastly undersell how much effort they put into doing something, even if that something is vibecoding a slop app that probably exists. But if people are literally prompting claude with a few sentences and getting revolutionary results, then yes, their job was meaningless and they should find something to do that they’re better at.

But what frustrates me the most about this whole hype wave isn’t just that the powers that be have bet the entire economy on a fake technology, it’s that it’s sucking all of of the air out of the room. I think most people’s jobs can actually provide value and there’s so much work to be done to make _real_ progress. But instead of actually improving the world, all the time, money, and energy is being thrown into such a wasteful technology that is actively making the world a worse place. I’m sure it’s always been like this and I was just to naive too see it, but I much preferred it when at least the tech companies pretended they cared about the impact their products had on society rather than simply trying to extract the most value out of the same 5 ideas.

0 comments

nikisil802mo ago

Yeah, I do tend to have a rather nihilistic view on things, so apologies.

I really think we're just cooked at this point. The amount of people (some great friends whom I respect) that have told me in casual conversation that if their LLM were taken from them tomorrow, they wouldn't know how to do their work (or some flavour of that statement) has made me realize how deep the problem is.

We could go on and on about this, but let's both agree to try and look inward more and attempt to keep our own things in order, while most other people get hooked on the absolute slop machine that is AI. Eventually, the LLM providers will need to start ramping up the costs of their subscriptions and maybe then will people start clicking that the shitty code that was generated for their pointless/useless app is not worth the actual cost of inference (which some conservative estimates put out to thousands of dollars per month on a subscription basis). For now, people are just putting their heads in the sand and assuming that physicists will somehow find a way to use quantum computers to speed up inference by a factor of 10^20 in the next years, while simultaneously slashing its costs (lol).

But hey, Opus 4.5 can cook up a functional app that goes into your emails and retrieves all outstanding orders - revolutionary. Definitely worth the many kWh and thousands of liters of water required, eh?

Cheers.

keeda2mo ago

A couple of important points you should consider:

1. The AI water issue is fake: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake (This one goes into OCD-levels of detail with receipts to debunk that entire issue in all aspects.)

2. LLMs are far, far more efficient than humans in terms of resource consumption for a given task: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76682-6 and https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/the-energy-footprint-of-humans...

The studies focus on a single representative task, but in a thread about coding entire apps in hours as opposed to weeks, you can imagine the multiples involved in terms of resource conservation.

The upshot is, generating and deploying a working app that automates a bespoke, boring email workflow will be way, way, wayyyyy more efficient than the human manually doing that workflow everytime.

Hope this makes you feel better!

D-Machine2mo ago

> 2. LLMs are far, far more efficient than humans in terms of resource consumption for a given task: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76682-6 and https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/the-energy-footprint-of-humans...

I want to push back on this argument, as it seems suspect given that none of these tools are creating profit, and so require funds / resources that are essentially coming from the combined efforts of much of the economy. I.e. the energy externalities here are monstrous and never factored into these things, even though these models could never have gotten off the ground if not for the massive energy expenditures that were (and continue to be) needed to sustain the funding for these things.

To simplify, LLMs haven't clearly created the value they have promised, but have eaten up massive amounts of capital / value produced by everyone else. But producing that capital had energy costs too. Whether or not all this AI stuff ends up being more energy efficient than people needs to be measured on whether AI actually delivers on its promises and recoups the investments.

EDIT: I.e. it is wildly unclear at this point that if we all pivot to AI that, economy-wide, we will produce value at a lower energy cost, and, even if we grant that this will eventually happen, it is not clear how long that will take. And sure, humans have these costs too, but humans have a sort of guaranteed potential future value, whereas the value of AI is speculative. So comparing energy costs of the two at this frozen moment in time just doesn't quite feel right to me.

2 more replies

simonw2mo ago

> For now, people are just putting their heads in the sand and assuming that physicists will somehow find a way to use quantum computers to speed up inference by a factor of 10^20 in the next years, while simultaneously slashing its costs (lol).

GPT-3 Da Vinci cost $20/million tokens for both input and output.

GPT-5.2 is $1.75/million for input and $14/million for output

I'd call that pretty strong evidence that they've been able to dramatically increase quality while slashing costs, over just the past ~4 years.

tuesdaynight2mo ago

Isn't that kind of related with the amount of money thrown at the field? If the economy gets worse for any reason, do you think that we can still expect these level of cutting costs in the future?

strange_quarkOP2mo ago

> But hey, Opus 4.5 can cook up a functional app that goes into your emails and retrieves all outstanding orders - revolutionary. Definitely worth the many kWh and thousands of liters of water required, eh?

The thing is in a vacuum this stuff is actually kinda cool. But hundreds of billions in debt-financed capex that will never seen a return, and this is the best we’ve got? Absolutely cooked indeed.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse