> Isn’t Apple potentially under a lot of pressure due to the DRAM prices as well as having to compete with AI for fab capacity?
I'd qualify this with for now. It's not entirely clear what happens in the event the AI industry implodes, but I do think there will be a glut of memory and hardware up for grabs. It very well could crash the consumer hardware market as a result. The AI obsession and investment has burrowed so deeply across the US economy that I can't think of a single industry that won't be impacted, including agriculture.
> It very well could crash the consumer hardware market as a result
Tbh, I hope it does. Prices are outrageous, and I'm a firm believer in personal computing/having access to powerful hardware, privately and locally, is hugely important.
On a more selfish note, I miss the days of being able to build an outrageously powerful desktop for myself for relatively cheap. For now I'm still holding onto my AM4 motherboard w/ 64GB DDR4 and an aging GPU, praying my 7 y/o GPU holds up long enough for prices to drop again.
64 GB! you are lucky :) sitting there with 16GB, a GPU that already shows the signs of strain, and AM4 Ryzen 5 5600G. (MacBook Air M1 equivalent in single-threaded tasks.) apparently the CPU requirements slowly crept up across the line. and then there is looming AVX512. why "looming"? because at some point enough people will move to it that software will require AVX512.
Maybe a year from now we'll all be using MI300As and EPYC 9600s to read e-mails. Or Nvidia Veras, maybe AWS will sell some of their Graviton stuff in an effort to offset their capex.
Unfortunately, I don't think IBM Cloud will suffer enough for me to play Tux Racer on my very own Z17.
I don’t think Linux on Z supports GPUs on the PCIe IO drawers, but that’s a relatively minor software enablement issue. All I need is a z17 for myself to play with it ;-)
I would also be very sad to lose one of my best coworkers. Everybody in the office treats Claude as their own assistant. Just today Claude reminded me I forgot to add a database zone migration to my fault-injection experiment. Not only he reminded me, he also implemented it with perfect consistency with project guidelines.
> It very well could crash the consumer hardware market as a result
I really hope it doesn't but I could see this resulting in just a couple "PC" manufacturers remaining when this is all over. Things will never be the same after that, and likely much worse with a couple companies telling us what we can and can't do on our devices.
in fact, agri sees its share of impact now! all of this investment has to come from somewhere, which means that money is getting sucked up into AI from the entire economy. job cuts in tech are part that, part general "de-bloating" of post-COVID tech. retail investors are a lot more likely to invest into AI than any other industry, although there are signs that big players already consider risks of overexposure to AI.
not to mention, agri saw a "bubble" of its own, surrounding Agtech, which peaked at 2021 and has been cooling ever since. scare quotes here because it was nothing like AI bubble
I don't think the parent is advocating adhering to their values, but instead just talking about the relativism of ethics and morality.
Society broadly cannot function without a shared set of morals (e.g. stealing sows discord which leads to anarchy, so we outlaw stealing). However, it can get quite complex and so there are infinitely many shades of grays. The base principal would still stand and you do your best to adhere to it in order to have a stable society.
Right I'm definitely not advocating that one should adhere to the values of the winners of the last 20-40 years.
I'm saying that if you're winning today (as measured in money/power), then by most objective notions of morality, you're probably a crappy, antisocial, person who is greedy and exploitative.
At some level it's almost definitional: if you share the material wealth you have, you'll never become that wealthy. If you don't consume a bunch of resources for the sake of your own consumption or to produce products that others consume, then you're also not going to make a lot of money.
> I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks.
This is kind of making the parent's argument for them about the dangers...
> And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even communicate with those people but to perform for an audience (often one that doesn't feasibly exist).
You're basically asking to be coddled, affirmed, validated, and protected. The world has conflict. Not all conflict is bad. Yes, social media weaponizes that conflict for ads, but I think the opposite is more dangerous in creating completely distorted realities. What you're describing sounds worse than the worst nightmare I've ever had, a world in which I'd be constantly disconnected from everyone else and would be disillusioned into thinking I'm not.
> Some caveats here: my view of social media is biased by the fact that jerks tend to pull me out of the woodwork- I get ragebaited, although I think I avoid the literal bait- so many of my interactions are with jerks.
>You're basically asking to be coddled, affirmed, validated, and protected.
Incorrect. My interactions with LLMs simply don't look like this. I don't know where you got this idea from what I said. I have a prompt that begs the thing to call me out, and it currently does so too much, which is exactly what I prefer.
What it doesn't do is rub minor disagreements in my face, jump to conclusions about who I am based on pre-existing beliefs, or tell me to go to therapy when I earnestly admit my humanity.
I'm not surprised, but what is surprising is we're now in a period in which the mask is slipping and no one seems to care enough to try to put it back on.
For all the hubris and arrogance of the tech scene, and especially the Bay Area's, founders at least pretended to pursue a greater calling than money by leaving cushy gigs to pursue a new venture they were passionate about. Sure, that only lasted a handful of years before it became a gold rush to move to the Bay for YC and pursue the startup-to-acquisition pipeline, but they at least pretended to care.
The naked pursuit of wealth at the cost of potentially tearing apart society is mildly alarming because the scale it's happening at is so big.
It seems like different people? The early tech scene was defined by people who got into tech because they loved it, jobs were paying under six figures. Then it became a gold rush, and the tech scene became defined by the newcomers who were after cash first, tech second. It's not that the old timers gave up on their ideals (well, some did), they were simply supplanted by larger numbers of people following the money.
In my opinion there is no "slipping mask", merely a changing of the guard that always happens when massive piles of generational wealth are at stake.
Nah, we knew back in the 90s that the tech industry had open disdain against American workers (pressuring congress to expand immigration to depress wages) and children (supporting charter schools while attacking children (yes when you attack public schools you're attacking the only people that benefit from it: children)). Not too mention all the horrid, extremely hostile business pursuits we saw from companies like Oracle + MSFT + Apple.
SV has always operated on exploitation of their workers, they just hid it well from the public.
Having been there i have to respectfully disagree. Probably because, as far as i can tell, you are warping their intentions to be what your intentions would be if you did what they did.
I just don't understand how to connect this analysis to what's happening. What OpenAI and Anthropic both say, loudly and repeatedly, is that they're working on one of the most impactful technical problems in the history of humanity. The reason they have lots of money is that lots of investors believe they're right.
Perhaps you've seen under their mask, and you know they're scamming the investors. After the NFT bubble it's a plausible hypothesis. But I don't know what it means to say that the mask just isn't there and it's naked pursuit of wealth.
I sometimes think, speeding up the Red Queen hypothesis to accelerate Cambrian Explosion by printing money from the top so that high-agency people would develop new products and services to capture more of the newly created money is a good thing?
While I agree that you don't want to punish people for making bad decisions, I do think there should be a carveout for when those decisions impact people's lives.
Yeah they didn’t like… migrate them to bad software they had to undo or something. They laid off hundreds of people due to overhyped products/trend chasing.
Lots of decisions impact lives. Some are literally life and death decisions. Sometimes the best decision possible with the information available at the time is going to turn out badly. Or maybe a bad decision achieves a good result.
That's why I'm saying to separate the process from the result when determining consequences. Someone who consistently exercises good judgment and who makes well-reasoned, thoughtful decisions is likely to achieve good results more often than someone who doesn't. But, event then, some things just don't work out and it impacts people's lives.
I would absolutely fire those idiots at Ford though. There's nothing wrong with trying to leverage AI. Personally, I like AI tools and I rely on them daily. But if someone lacks the judgment to figure out when a job should be performed by a human then they shouldn't be able to make decisions about how to use AI. These people are clearly out of their depth and just faking it. Clown show.
> The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.
Maybe, but it's also pretty clear that the entire purpose and intent of delivering "AI" to the economy is to wholly wipe out labor. Do I think that's realistic? No. SpaceX's total addressable market (TAM) in their S-1 filing to go public stated as much. Their TAM is $28.5T(!) with $26.5T of it being AI. That's larger than the US GDP (~$24T). You can only throw numbers like that around if you're explicitly aiming to replace labor, no matter how realistic it is.
Personally, I'm tired of mediocre people who've attained some amount of business success turning around and trying to dismantle democratic systems because it's incompatible with their world view.
It's more than reasonable to complain about these things night and day. The alternative to vocal complaints won't be pretty.
Well, my conspiracy theory is that it’s the other way around: AI leaders know they’re never going to recoup money for their investors. Money will be become useless and no one will be any richer than anyone else (though everyone will be far richer than the riches person is today). But they have to promise a mountain of riches in the future because they need those resources today to build that future.
In the article, it states that the two deals will cover the entire cost of SpaceX's AI buildout in 18 months. OpenAI and Anthropic would kill for that kind of cashflow.
xAI is a failure of an AI company from a consumer perspective. They invested a large amount of money into owning their own infrastructure, while driving away consumers with their right-wing or "alt right"-ish branding and having a reputation of X users abusing the AI services.
Turns out there was another company with a much better reputation for which the compute is a better fit. Now that the data centers are being put to use, they actually make them a little bit of money instead of losing money.
That story roughly tracks the one I hold. One piece that's missing is that grok's / X's image also made it radioactive to the best researchers. 'Aligned AGI' is an easier sell to the best engineers than 'abusive neo-Nazi chatbot with a porn problem'.
If I remember correctly, reporting at the time just after DC was selected was suggesting that it was always going to be DC to be in close proximity to government and that the whole fiasco was a way to extract as many concessions as possible from the city in its efforts to "compete" for the new offices. What even is an "HQ" if the actual headquarters that disproportionately houses more office workers than anywhere else is still in Seattle?
Hell, after the 'competition' was announced, many commentators observed that it was pretty much written with Arlington, VA in mind, and the competition was less a serious competition and more a ploy to try to get a lot of subsidies for what their plans already were. It's also worth noting that the bids that were accepted (Arlington and New York) were some of the most miserly bids.
> - Significantly increased my productivity as a software engineer.
This is exactly the point that keeps coming up that folks are struggling to grasp, myself included. How are you measuring this? It certainly makes me feel productive, but I'm not sure I can confidently say it has actually made me more productive. It's made the easy stuff a no-brainer (e.g. boilerplate, simple logic) and the moderate stuff really hard. Never mind the hard stuff. Vetting the code has become a whole other job on its own. The only folks I've found who confidently claim it increases productivity appear to be online (and without evidence), because no one in person is willing to claim that and show it.
I've never been a developer. Dabbled in frontend web for a bit (HTML/CSS/JS, no large frameworks) and felt like if I really dedicated some time to learning how to code, I'd be pretty decent at it. It's always intrigued me, and I've always had an itch to build things, but just never found the time. I'm in marketing now - I own an agency.
Over the last 6 months since the coding models really began to step up and get good, I've built several dedicated apps to support my business:
-Profitability optimizer and forecaster based on unit economics and current ad efficiency.
-Creative strategy tool that ingests brand and product data and helps explore primary and secondary personas and emotional motivators.
-Reporting tool that processes natural language queries and connects to multiple data sources to fetch results. Can schedule reports to post directly to Slack or email.
All robust and hosted on Railway. Team members can use them. Clients can use them. OAuth via Google.
Would any of this have been possible for me before the rise of frontier LLMs? Absolutely not. Learning the frameworks alone would have taken me longer than it's taken to just... build. Rapidly build and deploy. Total game changer for me.
Oh - and I'm building a game on the side. LLMs know Godot.
I can agree with the skeptics that LLM generated code is usually crap. I rarely accept its output without significant edits unless it's truly boilerplate, and I want to avoid the need for that kind of code in the first place.
For me, the killer use case is debugging. I hate wasting time debugging something that should work except for mistakes, and now I do that probably 75% less than I used to because AI does it for me.
I don't know if it makes me that much more productive, but I certainly enjoy my work more not having to do as much tedious debugging, and it feels like I waste a lot less time doing it.
I have about a dozen programs that are now close to ten years old, all running quietly in the background on my computer doing various tasks. I originally wrote all of them as JavaScript/Node programs. That was fine at the time, but the memory usage really adds up, since each one needs its own V8 runtime (anywhere from 50 to 100 MB per process).
I have basically zero familiarity with Golang, but I was able to use an agentic harness to run in the background and convert every single one of those scripts into Go equivalents. Because I've accumulated lots of before-and-after data, it was easy to confirm that the new versions matched the behavior and accuracy of the originals.
End Result: memory usage dropped from tens of megabytes per program to just a couple of megabytes each.
I've been able to build things that I otherwise would not have been able to build, in the free time that I have:
- a VST audio plugin
- a wedding website with RSVP functionality
- a relaxing game for my wife
At work, I've been able to build much more than I would have been capable of in the past. I'm a backend eng, and it allows me to build much much nicer frontends than I've ever been able to do in the past.
And before you tell me that the code is crap - it doesn't matter! It may or may not be good code, but it works and serves it's purpose very well. Anyways, I'm I'm not launching a rocket, or putting software into cars.
I linked to an example in the comment. In that particular case, I'd say probably 10-20x faster. I do embedded, backend, web and mobile app development.
I also notice these things. Otoh i spend definitely less than 50% of my time typing in code so it is impossible that it gives more than 2x speedup. And sometimes i lose time babysitting and rewriting stuff so all in all it is kinda no productivity gain.
> It's made the easy stuff a no-brainer (e.g. boilerplate, simple logic) and the moderate stuff really hard. Never mind the hard stuff. Vetting the code has become a whole other job on its own.
Not everyone has the same requirements, skills, usage patterns, and outcomes. It's that simple.
Granted, I only skimmed some high-line numbers, but isn't their only profitable project Starlink? SpaceX is functionally a satellite internet company that happens to make rockets.
I'd qualify this with for now. It's not entirely clear what happens in the event the AI industry implodes, but I do think there will be a glut of memory and hardware up for grabs. It very well could crash the consumer hardware market as a result. The AI obsession and investment has burrowed so deeply across the US economy that I can't think of a single industry that won't be impacted, including agriculture.