Thread

1. gradus_ad · 1790701889 · focus · HN ↗

   Ominous for the industry and investors that token price is becoming the main battleground. Could be Anthropic's rationale for IPOing this year.

   1. mixdup · 1790702708 · focus · HN ↗

      Another piece of evidence on the pile that the sudden panic and desire to "slow down" is because they're hitting the plateau on capability

      Which, honestly, is fine. A lot of juice to squeeze in efficiency and even if models got zero more capable, making the capability that is already here cheaper is a huge win for everyone (except Nvidia)

      1. luma · 1790705106 · focus · HN ↗

         Some version of this claim has been made for the past 4 years. There's a data cliff, there's no more compute to buy, the financials don't make sense and all of these orgs will be out of business by end of quarter.

         Not once has any of these predictions come true, the pace of progress has continued on it's exponential trajectory since ChatGPT first came to the public's attention.

         So why now? What is special about today that suggests all of this is coming to a screeching halt despite all evidence to the contrary?

         1. digdugdirk · 1790707387 · focus · HN ↗

            The difference now is that they've hit the "good enough" point. LLMs are a tool, and that tool is useful but not incredibly valuable unto itself.

            To make a manufacturing analogy - ChatGPT was a manual machining mill, and in the years after we've gone from that to a 3-axis CNC mill. Now we've added a 4th and 5th axis, which is great for the 2% of parts that need that functionality. But the big win was that initial jump from manual control to CNC. Why would I pay an extra $2 million for my CNC machine when I could just design my parts to be simpler to produce instead? The AI labs are trying to make these incredibly complex tools, but the market doesn't want/need them so they're competing on price for the tools that people do use. By selling their metaphorical CNC machines for half of what they cost to produce.

            Oh, and we've bet the entire economy on the hope that fancier CNC machines will magically solve all our problems in all industries, from healthcare to the legal system.

            So - will AI progress continue to improve? Sure. Will we continue lighting money on fire in order to make it happen? That remains to be seen.

            1. willchis · 1790708233 · focus · HN ↗

               This is how I feel about it. I've stopped looking at all the scores of new releases and just look at the price to see how much usage I can get in a month. Seems like I'm not the only one either, from comments above like

               > "Opus 5.5 is so good that I don't want it to be replaced anytime soon. Stop training models[...]"_

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