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AI needs $6T in annual revenue to justify data centre boom

222 points · 335 comments · Betelbuddy

  1. vdombr · · focus · HN ↗
    It's been almost half a year since we got powerful enough models, and I'm wondering, where are all those great things that were created with them? Maybe it's just me, but nothing has changed in my life so far. No improvements, but definitely, I need to be more careful when reading, listening, watching, and using things, as bad quality slowly creeps everywhere.
    1. rpdillon · · focus · HN ↗
      Local AI has completely changed my relationship with computers because now I can build utilities, tools, scripts, and get debugging help with my systems with far less friction than I ever could before. I used to do all of this by hand, but now I can spin it off as essentially an async sub-process to the AI that I can return to a few hours later and have the job done. Everything from system upgrades to custom Steam Deck launchers and ad hoc service scripts for my home lab have benefited from being able to run a two-bit quant of deepseek on my Strix Halo.

      I think it's going to remake our relationship with software because it completely alters the economics of creating one-off utilities, whereas software up until this point is generally regarded reuse as one of the highest virtues.

      We're not going to see that impact for a while though. It'll take years. App stores will eventually become on-demand software and we'll view the marketplace analogy (where human developers offer their wares) as antiquated. I'm not totally confident in this prediction because requirements gathering is still a challenge, but for anything vaguely common, I think it'll be a workable model.

      Mostly just focusing on positives in my life, not particularly bullish on the industry generating 6T/y.

      1. TimByte · · focus · HN ↗
        Our team migrated a chunk of internal parsers to local weights purely to kill off query costs. The cloud api bill dropped by two-thirds in a single month
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