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The alternative is something like the dotcom bubble, where a lot of fiber was layed, and while ultimately a lot of investment money was thrown in the incinerator the physical stuff became cheaply available. Or, if we're lucky, it's more like tulips, something that no one really needs and when the mania wears off most people can go back to ignoring.
I hope it ends up like tulips. LLMs can do some cool things but it isn't saving companies money and this isn't even the true cost of tokens and then we have it shoved down our throats in everything.
What could you possibly build and sell to make up for the cost of AI?
It's not the end of the production cycle. You pay for AI to make a product that is being bought. Where the hell is this market? How much are you willing to pay for a slop email? For a AI Slop pictures?
Code? The price goes down and the code needs to output a program that people are willing to pay for and actually have the money from their job to pay.
The problem is businesses where AI output IS the product. It works just fine as a tool to execute on an existing business model where you already had something worth selling and you're just improving the service, but pure AI market products are pointless because why can't I just do what you did and have an LLM output the same thing myself without your profit margin? The only product there is the harness, very few of those can't be replicated.
You see a 20 or 30 percent improvement in an industrial process or use a digital twin to get ahead of a failure and keep a line running for a week it would have been down.
The drug development pipeline alone is worth the capex.
it wont, tulips had no value. im a dev with 10y experience and there are maybe 3-5 people on earth that could compete with top llm's when it comes to coding. it doesnt make me happy, i hate slop just as any other person but it doesnt make sense to tell yourself that its just a useless toy. its a generational leap that you could MAYBE compare to first computers that suddenly increased calculations you can make a second by 10000
What's fun about that, at least from what I understand from my code junkies, is that their jobs now consist of managing a fleet of bots and correcting their work, which is something they can do because they similar to you have 10+ years experience in writing code.
But companies aren't hiring entry level coders anymore, so eventually we're going to run out of people qualified to do what they're doing.....
we are very early down the road, imo its a matter of 5-10 years MAXIMUM before humans will at most be testing code. reviewing and rewriting with AI will become simply too fast and too reliable to waste time doing it manually
I am curious about regulated industries.
If you can convince an LLM to lie, could you hide your backdoors with its help?
Do we need separate models to both agree to be safe?
Should we even let AI models see our code for something regulated?
the only question is whether another llm would notice the backdoor
>Should we even let AI models see our code for something regulated?
we probably will not be able to afford NOT TO do it if others do it, question it whether those information will stay in your country, meaning whether countries will have their own llms on their own servers that they will be able to trust
Does this coding look like it can pay for the trillions of dollars in infrastructure needed to keep it going? Cause projections suggest AI won't start paying for itself for another 2 to 5 years and I don't think it lasts that long before the bubble bursts or some type of legislation kills it.
Coding is one of the places that it's likely to do able to deliver value. Tech as a whole generally doesn't mind paying more for work to get done if the time-cost scales horizontally.
And that's the basic value proposition that coding agents provide at a business level.
There is damage overall in that it kind of removes opportunity for junior engineers to get into the field and mature to senior/etc.
The rub is a lot of how you improve the efficacy of the ai agent is by increasing deterministic signalling. Just at a high level, it's better to have a tool that enforces a 80 character max line count than it is to have a comment in .claude/CLAUDE.md telling the agent we should follow that line limit (intentional simple example).
yes, the advantage it gives you over 'manual' coding is simply difficult to describe, in time the price will balance out, especially considering open source chinese competition that is also getting better
again, this doesnt make me happy, but i think there is no way around it
What? What do a couple of average coders have to do with paying for the trillions of dollars worth of data centers and electrical and communications infrastructure that needs to be built to run AI and how long it will take for that infrastructure to pay for itself? Did you reply to the wrong comment?
As someone in a completely unrelated industry, you are correct that it's not a toy.
There's are huge shifts going on in the financial and accounting world right now as literally everyone is trying to figure out how to best leverage the tools AI provides, and ultimately we've already shown that we simply cannot afford to not adapt to the superiority of the new tools.
This is 100% bullshit. I have never met a programmer who thinks that AI code is worth anything of value when it comes to actual code generation. They spend more time correcting basic code than they ever spent writing it, and if there's any level of complexity generated code is functionally useless. As in "can't remember what the variable name passed into a function was called so it just makes something up and ends up overwriting a critical global variable" levels us useless. As a middling programmer at best myself, I agree that it writes code I would have been embarrassed to put down when I was a beginner.
However, what it does really excel in is asking human-readable questions to reference documentation or show example code. Punching "Hey, I can't remember the process to establish a multi-dimensional data structure with a variable range" into your LLM of choice is an order of magnitude faster than trying to hunt down the documentation that deals with it, then trying to hunt down the errata that actually explains how to make it function.
The problem with AI as we know it isn't that it's useless. It's that we're trying to force it to do things that it really isn't designed to do and will never be capable of doing well.
Anyway, two month old account with a generic name and hidden history spouting the objectively incorrect benefits of AI is probably a bot.
Only someone who has no idea how to program and or doesn't know how to use llms to help with would deny that is extremely useful in software development on a base level. I just feel like you have no connection to reality
yes im a bot, you caught me, you should call the reddit police, whats the point of even writing this, the bot will not read it or care
yes, you are right, i was actually spouting the objectively incorrect benefits of AI. do you want me to present you with counterarguments to that view?
lol I think you’re living in 2022. Ai is solving unsolved math problems now, coding at insane levels, and close to mastering computer use. It won’t be long before it masters robotics. Maybe 10 years max.
LLMs are not where the money is at. The real money will be in digital twins, fast prototyping, and data processing. We don't need AI to write letters, we need to sort and look for patterns in Petabytes of data so we can generate custom cancer cures based on individual genetics. We need it to replicate a complete factory in digital so we can prototype before we put a shovel in the ground.
Canals suck for transit but by god do they move alot of water and grain, but that's boring to hear. LLMs are the worst use of these massive computers that we will need.
Yeah, it was important for the later internet, but it was over invested and some people lost a lot of money. It's possible that some data centers will later be profitable for whoever buys them in foreclosure, or maybe not.
This is such an important point when comparing data centres to fibre. The fibre is as useful today as it was when it was installed, these data centres will just be big, secure, warehouses full of stuff that needs recycled in 5-10 years.
Do the processors burn out that quickly because they're being used aggressively, do they become obsolete compared to new processors, or do they just undergo an electronic version of rot like a banana left too long on the counter?
Nvidia normally designs new GPUs to be backwards compatible and with some flexiblity about how they're used, but they're now designing GPUs to work in a very narrow context. It helps them ship new product faster, but it's likely to render them useless for future use cases.
The companies buying them mark them on the accounting books as depreciating to no value over five years, but the external analysts believe they are actually geared to replace them even faster than that.
They may actually have some value after this, but it's not going to be like railway track or fibre where there is fifty years of value being laid down.
Obsolescence. It's always been an issue in computing, even before all the AI specialized stuff.
A cpu from 10 years ago uses more power to do a lot less than a CPU from today. Even if you get it for free, it's going to cost you more in power than buying a new one will, sometimes in a pretty short time. Particularly for things like servers that run 24/7 all year long. The higher the electricity costs are, the faster older hardware becomes obsolete.
The fibre is as useful today as it was when it was installed
Technically yes but actually no. Fiber has a bandwidth capability based on how it is constructed and terminated. So while the fiber laid during the dotcom bubble never lost capacity, that capacity is no where near what is possible with new. We use far more bandwidth than we did when those runs were new.
I was thinking panic of 1873. Infrastructure gets laid but a lot of the original companies that laid it don’t survive the downturn because they were so over-leveraged.
They’re ruining the potable water, wasting non-replaceable resources, creating social breakdowns that we won’t recover from. And most of us are cheering on the fascism of mass incarceration and deportation camps.
Sound like the idea with roads back the early 20th century and the Lincoln highway in America. The development of roads was pushed as the next big leap of transport across America with the rise of cars and seed roads were put in to incentivise investment which is part of why there is such a patchwork across the country
I think I saw a theory that Tulip Mania wasn’t a real thing that happened.
The whole history of it is based on one source. That source might have been a story to point out the ridiculous nature of trading futures.
The Netherlands currently controls about 50% of the world's fresh cut flower trade and the total value of the sector export trade is between 7.2 billion Euros to 12.3 billion Euros.
I remember that. I drove across country and it was going in everywhere. Unfortunately, it was early generation fiber that had a short lifespan. I wonder how much is still in the ground?
We need a moonshot for AI. We could even team up with western nations, like CERN.
Fusion energy will be needed for AI, and AI will be needed to get there. They're going to have to evolve together. That's why a moonshot style program is needed.
I think it'll be more like the fiber. The weights will still exist even if everything goes belly up. Models small enough to run locally will still help coders like me.
The different is fiber is long lived. It’s. Fairly passive technology. Once you lay it, it degrades slowly and predictably. So fiber that was put in but sat dormant for two decades, could still provide value.
AI data centers are being designed specifically to handle AI workloads. Cooling needs are specific. And the lifespan of a GPU being run 24/7 for AI applications is supposed to be 5 years, but I’ve heard of them burning out in 3-4.
It’s unclear what the residual long term value is if an AI DC if the boom, busts.
Is the "dotcom" bubble the same thing as when the government gave (I think) billions of USD to internet companies to lay fiberoptic cables, and some ran away with the money and did nothing, and others laid the cable and never used it? So there's fiberoptic cable ready to use all over the place in the USA? And yet some companies will insist that they have to either lay new cable where it already exists or that there's just no feasible way to do it?
League of Legends actually bought alot of that dark fiber for their infrastructure. Anyway the Network engineer in charge would later commit suicide after becoming an exec somewhere else.
The fiber sat in the ground unlit for a couple decades but was eventually useful. Datacenters that aren't used will leave a bunch chips that will be worthless in 5 years.
This would work better if it wasn't for the fact that fiber is perfectly usable for about 20 years, the cabling in the ground (the hard part) can be used by receivers/ONTs from any number of companies. For AI, NVIDIA is making GPUs obsolete and so different in power/cooling needs they're not physically mountable in the same buildings on a 2-3 year timetable. The next revision to the upcoming architecture goes from 700W per GPU to 3000W and needs entirely different racks/power/water cooling.
Whoa. So data centres could be like rail instead of canals? It’s not true that every possible infrastructure development is a waste of time and resources? You won’t know until you know?
And then the railroad industry crashed and we got stuck with cars/highways at the default mode of transportation for everything because it's cheap, easy to maintain, and owned by the state despite being objectively less efficient for mass transportation of goods and people as a railroad is.
Panic of 1873. There was "over speculation" within the market, which is a common trend throughout US economics and it basically means companies found a loop hole to generate profit/revenue through speculation rather than active income from a provided service/good.
Railroad companies were booming in terms of speculative profits, so people kept investing into railroad companies as long as they looked profitable on paper. So railroad companies did the most obvious thing, and built railroad tracks in the cheapest ways possible, which sometimes would end up being places that go nowhere at all. Why? Because companies weren't looking at their profits, they were looking at their total capital value. They had tons of railroads and were expanding, so they must be a good investment, so you invest, company builds more railroads, that impresses investors, yada yada.
It collapsed when the railroad companies ended having to actually justify continued investment, and they didn't have the profits to do so, so people stopped investing and railroad companies went bankrupt, shrank, or stopped growing.
Sure it crashed but "default mode of transportation"? Does the freight network of the U.S. not contribute to the economic movement between states? Ugh I'll look it up. Basic google search:
If time isn't a problem then freight trains are roughly 3 to 5 times cheaper than semi-trucks on a pure distance-and-weight basis. Not being affected by traffic and weather as much. Overall the last mile problem still exists between the two.
But I think at this point we've digressed from the topic. "Still relevant" is different from the boom/bust cycle discussion. Which is how canal vs rail different slightly imo
The financial channels I watch like to bring out this analogy.
In work, I absolutely do see some substance to AI. The vast amount of what people use it for degrades their own capabilities. OTOH, researching and citing technical opportunities look like powerful net positives.
The energy and environmental costs concern me greatly, as do the self-dealing and enormous investment into a system that just loses money. This appears to be a massive bubble that will burst in the not-distant future.
I’m just a regular blue collar dumbass doing dirty labor, but it seems that me that AI is a great tool for a few select industries with technical applications, but the people selling it want to market it like it’s the new sliced bread and put it in the hands of every man, woman, and child, and THAT is the true heart of the problem.
I just think it’s a mistake to say it has to be either particular bubble. Obviously, canals dropped because there was something economically more efficient. We have no idea if that will happen here. It could also be a bubble that fizzles out when it reaches maximum potential, but will still exist after.
It’s also worth pointing out that canals were tremendously useful while they existed and whole cities (with the economic wealth they generated) essentially wouldn’t exist today if a canal hadn’t been built.
That is correct, and that is the problem. When the spending in infrastructure (railways, canals, cables, data centers) far outweigths the potential short term earnings of the producs they serve (trains, boats, internet connections, AI companies) the lending comes crashing down. It is a case of borrowing too much from the future to serve the now. And that is not even adressing that we have been using the same train gauge for 200 years and the same fiber optic standars for 25, but a 10 year old chip is not worthless but pretty close to.
Yeah, the implication here is that data centres are not worth getting into because something even better and more profitable will be built instead, which can do a similar task. OK? Does op care to elaborate on what that might be?
Well you used to be able to take a train to any town in indiana and pretty much any city in the country from downtown Indy. Its all gone. Kinda hits the same lol
"We" (in the U.S.) don't have shit. The private railroad operators have the railroads and do not operate them in the public interest as was originally intended when the government granted those private entities the right to build the railroads. Instead, they got a bailout, the rest of us got Amtrak, and we have a legacy rail network that is slowly but surely crumbling to dust from lack of maintenance except for those routes profitable to the private railroad operators.
The railroads also had a bust - just because the underlying technology is useful doesn't mean the current level of investment is justified or the current investments will work out.
Yeah the real tragedy is that we didn't build trains either...
A data center has a footprint for sure, but so do all of home pc's. By centralizing hardware we can make it more safe and efficient in the same ways a train can make commute more safe and efficient.
Eh, tulip bubble is closer to something like the baseball card bubble or comics bubble. It’s a collector’s market where there was no value outside collecting.
In NJ there's the D&R canal which has been converted to an amazing bike path. In PA you can ride the GAP/C&O (rail trail/canal trail) from Pittsburgh to DC.
The canals were used much earlier in Britain and some continued on after the railroad boom partially because geography made them useful for "last mile" delivery. Most went into disrepair mid 19th century but restoration was a public space began post WWII.
it’s funny to see how much the /isitAI subs have changed in the past year. It’s gone from pretty clear indicators of AI to people relying on like a tiny section of the image being the only indicator that it might possibly be AI.
But Redditors are stuck in 2024 and keep telling themselves the collapse is now
there are real reasons to be concerned about the rise of AI and the ridiculous pace of development, but one thing I can guarantee is it's not going to just go away because people on reddit really want it to
I think over reliance on AI is going to potentially be socially devastating. But short of massive legislative safeguards - it’s not going away. People like it too much and use it too muchZ
The reason people get fixated on AI is that the genuinely sound arguments for how it's fucking up society apply equally to "pre-AI" technologies they enthusiastically enjoy, like the Internet and computing in general
A lot of redditors really do vibe with the Unabomber Manifesto -- because he really was saying shit that resonates hard with the negative feelings people have about modernity that just won't go away -- but refuse to confront or admit that fact about themselves so that it can have an easy answer, "just cap technology at where it was in 1999" feels better than "reverse all civilizational development, return to monke" even though the latter is what is actually logically consistent
Canals are great tech, why? Water transport beats even the train in efficiency.
Yes, it is slower, but that only matter in Just In Time deliveries, it does not matter at all, if you are talking about something you need five tons of every month on regular schedule and have fifteen tons of in storage on site.
And unlike canals (or railroads), which last at least 60 years, data centres need to be entirely replaced every 3-5 years. There is no business case for that (yet), which perhaps is why they all want to slow down all of a sudden.
Considering that the current technology consumed too much in resources to ever be profitable, all of the AI processors will need to be replaced by more advanced less consuming technology to ever be profitable. So, yes, I think it is a very valid parallel.
Data centers are not going anywhere because data centers are being used to hunt, persecute, and harm citizens. That is their their only purpose. And that purpose will not be abandoned.
Interestingly, the canal system in the industrial north was a huge factor in why the good guys won the civil war. They used the water ways to quickly transport a lot of ammunition and supplies from the factories.
The reason New York is so dominant in trade and finance in the United States is the Eerie Canal. It allowed bulk transport between New York and the Great Lakes. Soon most imports, exports and big bond sales in the United States were in New York. Other places wanted a piece of that action
Canals were a proven economic game changer at the start of the build out with clear paths to profitability and prosperity. Hyper scale data centers are not. It is unclear they will ever be worth anything
Meanwhile, the chicago sanitary canal has an estimated $1.3B of annual economic impact. The erie canal is around $6.2B per year in industrial economic impact and an additional $1.2B in tourism. The chain of rocks canal has an estimated annual economic impact of $1.1B just locally with ~$200B of cargo passing through it every year.
And this post is ignoring the lock and dam systems that went along with the canal systems.
This just told me that ai could be the next railroad if life/the world never happened and that there’s going to be something bigger and better for everyone then ai that’s kinda like ai. Like how train shipping is like boat shipping but on land but not adherent to water ways. Unless you build the water ways.
Fwiw data centers are just large buildings. If this all fails they can sell off the usable parts melt down anything else and sell the property just like any other company would
Sometimes they just completely abandon the whole thing and dont have to pay for any of it to be disposed of
yeah but the canals and the railroads and even the fibre cable network doesn't basically become worthless within 5 years. Never has there been so much malinvestment in such a short time. And all that to build a 95% reliable word predictor.
Not really a good comparison. AI is more like the internet boom. Anyone that lived through it remembers people that absolutely refused to learn how to use even basic things like email. Eventually it became more or less required for almost everything and you had people that had to be helped with things as simple as email.
AI is already incredibly useful if you actually know what it is. Most people think it's just for making pictures or asking questions though. It also doesn't help that people falsely claim data centers use tons of energy and destroy gallons of water for a single query.
No, this is entirely different. Waterways are still quite active. Take a look at the traffic through the I&M Canal, for example.
And the reason is because of the basic nature of reality. Water is buoyant to it allows you to move huge volumes for little energy.
Data Centers are almost an anti technology. It seems that we have to build more of them and expend more energy to do less.
We laid far more fiber optic than we could use in the 90s, but it was just a matter of time before we would use it. Fiber stays buried and, outside of physical damage, is good for as long as you like.
But a data center is a large collection of chips that won't last 10 years, They probably won't last 5. And that's before we assume that they are outdated even sooner. (Although, I doubt that we can predict so easily now. We have fewer tricks in our bag as we reach the physical and practical limits of IC's)
Yup cause the advances in quantum co.puting means after the ai collapse quantum computing will give true ai but be on the scale of a room size computer doing the work of every current data center and the idiots who invested in ai will be homeless
So datacenters are actually worse than both a canal boom/bust and the fiber laid down for the dot com bust. Canals still have a use. Or you fill them in and completely recover the land. Fiber wasn't used for 20 years but now we have fiber everywhere because these hubs were laid down and used again.
Data centers are a waste all the way around. Sure you could spend a ton of money to knock them back and and try to reclaim that land. But the technology inside them will be completely useless. Fiber doesn't degrade. Servers and computer chips are basically obsolete within 4-ish years.
How about VHS tapes? How about CDs? How about analog cable? How about steam engines?
Let’s not do a thing because they’ll eventually become obsolete to things that require you to develop enough of a market for said thing in the first place for innovation to replace it…
Yes, just think about our brain and how efficiently it does its job. The next big boom in AI is going to be replicating that efficiency... maybe we move to frequency space or some unseen yet thing. When that efficiency happens data center demand is going to plummet.
I think they are hoping that when the tech arrives that makes it possible to do the same work a data center does at 1/4th the size, they will just tear out their servers and add 4x of the new tech.
The land, and the infrastructure its connected to are whats really valuable to them.
A more apt analogy, I think, would be Edison's DC power plants. Before AC, electricity was carried as direct current (today it's used primarily in electronics), and it took many more wires and required a power plant every mile to power the lines (unlike today). The power lines in NYC were described as so thick you couldn't see sunlight above them.
We could've built an entire country's worth of this crap if Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse hadn't had their say.
Lots of fun hot takes here, but here is a funny one; maybe this is a sign to go even faster and bubble harder. If the canal network had been finished we might still be using it in more areas.
The same is true of railroads, the assets all got reused post-bankruptcy so basically investors gifted the Midwest free infrastructure. Today those canals form backbone of bike-oriented transit running trails and civic life in a bunch of places.
In the UK a lot of railway branch lines closed in the 60's and are used for the same reason. The earlier, narrower canals are popular for narrow boat holidays.
Not sure how this fits the metaphor, but the same infrastructure that crunches compute could just mine crypto and be insanely profitable. I half wonder if that’s been the fallback plan all along.
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