How are all these related news regarding silicon shortages surprising at all? It was well predicted that while 2023 chip turmoil[1] was happening, big AI aimed to secure almost all of the demand[2] intended for consumer markets regarding RAM chips so as to win the AI race going forward from that date. They cannibalized almost the entirety of the supply chain, so that they could sell you the incredibly subsidized AIaaS[3] with still considerably higher inference and astronomically higher training process without as of late 2026, failing to achieve any meaningful productivity at all[4]. The serfs now will be happy to own their decade old DDR4 architecture.
No productivity from AI is a crazy conclusion to make given the impact we already know it's having on software development. Just because you can't see it in the data yet doesn't mean it's not there, which is what the article you cited says.
Remember too that these models only really became useful less than a year ago with Opus 4.6 being an inflection point. It takes a long time for the economy to reorganize itself so it's not surprising we're not immediately seeing the payoff in economic data.
Of course, when we talk about utilizing AI as an efficient tooling, it is well expected to see the very outcomes you desire. But the point here is the disconnect between the perceived productivity gains and their corresponding measuring metrics. Remember the Goodhart's Law[1]? It becomes fairly unreliable when you try to measure productivity by a set of standards instead of actually producing productivity. When it comes to future about this issue, I'd hope to see the progress actually happening in open source, decentralized AI instead of the current way of using it.
Yeah, I talk to normies and nobody still understands the utility of just having a ChatGPT desktop app being able to basically drive your computer and do whatever needs to be done.
Well is there any productivity gain from chatbots? So far, I mostly see a deluge of misleading content disguised as documentation for things that don't even exist. If anything, the amount of slop out there is slowing me down…
I can't imagine it can even feel productive to anyone, unless you use agents to automate re-rolling your slop machines, but then you're just going to end up with an unmaintainable ball of mud. Either way, it's definitely net negative.
Kind of same outcome as if you just generated lots and lots of random code (perhaps at AST level; but don't tell your Claude, that'd trick it into making itself obsolete tech!) and compiled it in parallel till it passed tests, but this time around, the computer also tells you that you hit the nail on its head, that you're totally right <s>and that you're such a good puppy. agent uses tool `clicker`</s>
I was in this camp until a few months ago, but LLMs have really gotten that good now that you can actually trust an agent with a ticket and it will do it cromulently. The code quality isn't any worse than if a junior did it. Sure, you'll sometimes want to refactor something, but then you can just tell the agent and it will do it for you.
I try to keep up with the tech, I also see what people do with it, but the amount of expensive computation you need to do very basic stuff just isn’t productive in any way. It’s random code generator with extra steps. Throw a junior at it, you’ll get a future senior. Throw a bot at it, you’ll get praised for your clever prompting, you’ll pay for tokens and have some slop in return. I can’t see how it’s productive to sustain a forever-junior?
Also, is “update your priors” some slang for “tell your parents”…? In that case, I can only say older folks are especially vulnerable to slop and I can’t imagine my parents would benefit from that tech.
Anyway, legitimate uses for chatbots are extremely niche, to the point I can’t really name even one such use…
"Update your priors" means to adjust your opinions as the circumstances that caused you to form them change [1].
> I can’t see how it’s productive to sustain a forever-junior?
Well, I've met enough developers throughout my career that were successful forever-juniors that I reckon it must be productive to somebody. And tokens may be "expensive computation", but those developers were more expensive still.
90% of everything was already slop. The simple matter is that in many fields, slop is enough to clear the bar, especially when that slop makes the unit tests light up in green.
> "Update your priors" means to adjust your opinions as the circumstances that caused you to form them change [1].
I checked Wiktionary but I was in disbelief that's labeled as a dogwhistle of a known fascist community[0] being used so freely here, so I gave you a benefit of the doubt..? I guess maybe it's not associated purely with them, but then it's not a valid or widely used phrase in English, so pardon my confusion..?
> Well, I've met enough developers throughout my career that were successful forever-juniors that I reckon it must be productive to somebody. And tokens may be "expensive computation", but those developers were more expensive still.
As someone who identifies with "rationalism", wouldn't you say this looks like bit of a selection bias on your side? Meanwhile the "ai race" to deploy the greatest boot-licking chat bot is having measurable and devastating impact on the environment and people? (And all that without tangible productivity gains, only with potential for long term loss thereof)
> 90% of everything was already slop. The simple matter is that in many fields, slop is enough to clear the bar, especially when that slop makes the unit tests light up in green.
Everything but pump and dump schemes (and perhaps other kinds of one-off fraud) has ongoing costs of maintenance, which slop tends to only increase. It was never nice to maintain things, but whether you keep burning tokens or hire actual expert devs to fix sloppy vibey mess, you'll be overpaying compared to if you put high effort from the start.
Yep. To the point it makes you wonder if the "AI bubble" is totally misunderstood. It's less "AI bubble" and much more "Monopolize computing". Buy up computers until most companies have no choice but to use cloud, then buy out chip fabs entirely, then never give anyone a working free-programmable computer again. All software goes through approval from Google/Apple/Microsoft.
You know, what Microsoft has been trying with Palladium (can't risk general purpose computers! People might commit, oh the horror, copyright infringement, with those!)
Imho, as hardware keeps getting better, it seems to me this is the only thing that can make cloud investments worth it in the long term (which is only 2-3 years away) for hyperscalers. It's the only explanation. If OpenAI/SpaceX/Musk/... really thought AI would take over all jobs, they wouldn't be investing in compute, they'd be buying up farms, land, harbors, mines, bankrupt factories, fucking tax prep businesses ...
Make compute only possible within Goog/Amazon/Microsoft/... walled gardens ... that's the play. And this AI is a cute technology that conveniently needs lots of compute, but it's not even the actual core of the play. A very simple very old style monopoly grab, you know, the business plan people got convicted for trying in ancient Persia, 5000 years ago.
> Yep. To the point it makes you wonder if the "AI bubble" is totally misunderstood. It's less "AI bubble" and much more "Monopolize computing". Buy up computers until most companies have no choice but to use cloud.
Unless prices get categorically higher, I don't think that's likely. Like 10x more than it is now.
Companies were buying computers for all their employees in the 90's, where a mediocre laptop could pretty easily cost two grand in 1990s money. My mom just bought a middle-of-the-road laptop for about a thousand dollars in today-money, and that was a consumer buying it; companies can generally spend more. "No choice but to use the cloud" feels like it's way too strong of a conclusion to draw.
I think they'll keep cheap consumer electronics for the most part. Not as cheap as this last decade, but still cheap. They just want to control the entire software chain from boot to network-accessed resources.
Are you human? Then you must verify it from a "trusted computer", preferably with your driver's license. Gets governments and corporations as much information as they want, along with a guarantee that you can't "steal" their content and can't avoid their ads.
Cloud wasn't sold as a performance thing. It's more about outsourcing the maintenance (let AWS replace a dead PSU at 4AM) or for the promise of scaling tasks to infinity for dynamic demand (web hosting).
You might see interest in thin-client plays for the same reason. They'd like to replace the local desktop with throwaway $50 terminals because it's easier to deploy on a standardized VM image and not have to replace dead SSDs and CPU fans.
Workstation tasks that require low-latency and high performance seem to stay local because the performance is simply not there.
Really, I'm not sure how much simpler and clearer their comment could be:
The Persian empire did not exist until round about 550 BCE.
Thus, the upthread statement,
> the business plan people got convicted for trying in ancient Persia, 5000 years ago.
Is somewhat nonsensical: 5000 years ago, Persia did not exist. I suppose we could be talking about whatever existed in that locale of the world around 3000 BCE. But that's what they're saying: "what do you mean, 'in ancient Persia, 5000 years ago', Persia did not exist then".
I mean, "Persia" as an entity is barely a thing, in 550 BCE it was the Achaemenid Empire, before that it was the Medes, then you have the greek/macedonian seleucid dynasty, then some other stuff happens and you eventually end up with arab/muslim controlled areas and so on.
Persia, if anything, is a region of the earth, a chunk of land, in the same way Mesopotamia is. Saying it "didn't exist" at a specific point in time is fairly meaningless and the term was mostly used by greek/westerners to refer to the general geographic area.
A "monopoly" grab from a conspiracy spanning all of the major tech firms? You really think that's the most likely explanation? Not just that the firms are competing in AI and all realize they need massive compute?
Prices are up a bit but there are plenty of "free-programmable computers" from a dozen or more manufacturers on the market. That's not going away.
The word conspiracy is misused there. That is not what a conspiracy is. This would be all those companies acting in their own best interest, separate from each other. The word for that isn't conspiracy but collusion, and it doesn't even require those companies to actually cooperate with one another as implied by the word conspiracy. They would all be acting in their common interest, with no or limited agreements between them.
I don't think you have your definitions straight since collusion does mean conspiring to work together. Your original post pointed towards AI just being cover for a plan to create monopoly power amongst the tech firms. I don't see how you can make that argument with a straight face. Apple, HP, Dell, Asus, etc are just going to stop selling computers?
I take your point that AI is pushing up the price of computers, at least temporarily, but you're leaning way into conspiracy and cynicism in your original post.
"AI" is really 2 companies, by extension funded/owned mostly by FANG, and is not pushing up the price of computers, it's buying ALL DDR5 capacity, processors, memory, and of course GPUs, including the fab capacity to build them in the first place. I don't know if you've recently tried to convince your boss recently to buy a new machine, but ...
I mean they're demonstrably not buying 'all' capacity or you wouldn't be able to have a brand new computer from a dozen different manufacturers with a wide range of specs delivered to your doorstep by tomorrow morning. They're buying enough capacity to put pressure on prices but if the game plan is to literally force you to only access compute through the cloud that's just not working or even feasible.
[1]: https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded/artic...
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-supplier-sk-hynix-...
[3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24616
[4]: https://www.apollo.com/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/No...