Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | iterateoften's commentslogin

There is the Law of Demand. As ai costs plummet, demand increases, just nobody knows the curve shape yet. But could be that cheap inference is how all the AI supply meets the demand

> There is the Law of Demand

What is this?

Demand functions (price as a function of quantity demanded) take all kinds of shapes. Veblen goods are the silly example of wrong-sloped demand [1]. The in-vogue example of sigmoid demand, however, is hot water–make hot water (or lighting, for that matter, as another comment today pointed out for LEDs) cheaper and there is a limit to the things we want hot water for. Halving the cost of hot water doesn't induce much new hot-water demand, it increases demand for other goods and services.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good


I don't think that follows when free plans to get people interested are still a thing. Most people aren't paying anything at all.

Wut? Enron was literally shutting down energy grids in one location to spike prices in another. Way way way more to Enron story than financing to begin with.

Not everything is an Enron


Enron was doing some bad things in energy markets, but they were profitable bad things and unrelated to the collapse. What brought Enron down was accounting problems, with many of the specific details having clear parallels here.

In particular, the "circular financing" agreements look very structurally similar to things like the Merrill Lynch barges. They're not exactly the same, but Nvidia's statements in the source article make me more rather than less concerned; does it just so happen to be the case that their investment targets all want to spend lots of money on Nvidia products, or does an Nvidia investment come with implicit and unaccounted guarantees that the target will spend lots of money on Nvidia products?


> Enron was literally shutting down energy grids in one location to spike prices in another.

Kind of reminds me of the current lack of supply of GPUs and ram to consumers.


How? Two very different things but because we don’t like AI we make bad comparisons?

Enron comparisons folks are making is about why they failed, not why they made a lot of money. They ultimately failed for reasons scarily similar to what’s going on now across the industry with special purpose vehicles and off balance sheet liabilities.

Just wrong. It’s a superficial comparison at best. Enron was cooking books using entities they controlled but making it look like they did not.

You could make an argument that maybe this is similar to oracle (I think?) in the com bubble financing networking gear to customers.

I still think that misses the mark since the customers using hardware are have demand for computer by their customers.


And people were really buying electricity too.

The WSJ recently reported that there’s around 3 trillion in off balance sheet liabilities floating around in AI. It’s very unclear where the $3 trillion to pay those bills will come from.

Nobody is saying it’s “illegal” but it was news in the WSJ as the companies using creative accounting aren’t exactly going out of their way to make sure everyone knows that this $3 trillion in liabilities exists.


What is your point about electricity? Enron was cooking their books by controlling other companies they said they had no control of to improve their own financial health.

I think there questions for the commitments your talking about but they are not due today and I suspect when spread out over the life of the commitment are dwarfed by cash flow.


Boots. You could cook boots but they still won't be edible.

You seem hung up on what’s in the prompt or not. Agents are RL to resolve conflicting goals. Not too surprising at all that emergent goals come up from a probabilistic brute force

The agents' behavior is not necessarily surprising. But is is not "genie" - like

It’s not dirt, it’s soil. Soil is a living ecosystem.

So is my gut but if I smeared my insides on my body I would likely fall ill. Even pathogens form a living ecosystem.

Or, to put it a different way,

> Cars have windows and can go. Houses have windows and can’t go. So it’s not the windows that make the car go


Your insides are different from your outsides. Your skin has a different microbiome than your gut. Hyper cleanliness on your skin kills beneficial microbes that maintain an equilibrium when they're alive.

Speak for yourself. I know this guy called Howl...

> You also have to spend time on textual matters like grammar and style and a lot of "unspoken rules", which aren't really about linearizing your thinking about the contents.

Hard disagree. Constraint is the driver of creativity. Also rewording sentences to sound better or make sense can make you reconceptualize the whole concept you are expressing


Sure, but doing an interpretative dance or an abstract painting can make you reconceptualize the whole concept too. But we're not really pushing those tools as much as writing.

Take for example a non-native writer of the language. I'm sure having to check up words from a dictionary may help to reconceptualize things, but I'm sure also that it's not often very efficient. And I think similar is going on for natives too for many types of writing.


It’s not clear that doing an abstract painting can make you reconceptualize in the way that reframing in other words does. The point about putting in other words is that you may stumble on a clearer, more tractable, more extensible framing. The kind of reframing an abstract painting does is very different, more like changing your attitude or way of looking. But I don’t think it ever leads to a place where you will suddenly find yourself with a sharper understanding that helps you communicate with others more effectively.

I'm not much of an artist, but I'd guess trying to paint a painting of how quicksort works, in a way someone else can grasp it too, can need a lot more reconceptualization than writing a description about it. Doing plots or diagrams, or even implementing an algorithm, for sure often need more thinking than writing a description.

Yes but diagrams aren’t abstract paintings (or interpretive dances), which I assume the original commenter meant as intentionally artsy and indirect forms of art.

How many previous attempts with other models failed or on other problems. Perhaps this is $300k out of $100M or $1B of total budget just breadth first searching theorems in math and all the failed attempts conveniently don't get mentioned.

Anthropics PR strategy is to induce fear by telling. OpenAI strategy is to induce fear by ignore basic safety and letting the bad thing happen to then justify whatever oversized response the government comes up with to regulate models.

2x faster at what resolution? is 6mo vs 1 year really that different? Usually surprise comes in order of magnitude mismatches in expectations.


Yes, 6 months vs 1 year is huge for technology that has gained wider adoption only recently.


Adoption means nothing.

2x gains from a mature technology would be surprising.

2x gains from a new tech would still be called “low hanging fruit” in another setting.

I don’t read enough to know in what ways the training / other technical steps have really advanced.


I mean if each agent reduces probability of error by 90% then after 9 agents you would have “nine nines” of reliability.

Obviously maybe it’s not composable like that exactly in real world but that’s the intent of agents checking agents


? What? A healthy colon and diet usually do not need to strain or rush. Just sit and poop. like 1min tops.


You need to get that dysentery tended to.


? Sorry? A healthy colon and diet it’s not liquid or messy. A nice type 4 normal solid log that slides on out.

I’m very scared for most people I see online discussing BMs. People have some seriously twisted up guts and diets.


Are you trying to let people know you're a generator of superior fecal matter? If so, there's no need to apologize for it. Carry that stuff with pride.


It seems we are unfamiliar with sarcasm.


Everyone's gut is different, but one minute isn't unreasonably short, especially if you have something like a bidet for fast cleaning afterwards. Are you sure you're not constipated?


I'm fine, enjoying my book.


Don't you think that if you have time to read your book then you don't really need to poop yet? Why not just wait until you're ready to go in?


Who says the readers are waiting while they sit? What's the rush out of there? Maybe this will make the concept easier for you to understand -

Restaurant: sit, eat, drink, chatter, coats, car, home.

Toilet: sit, splash, tinkle, read, wipe, wash, out.


Sure, but the actual splash act just takes a minute at most, and usually about 10 seconds for me. I don't understand how you can have time to read anything.


You're getting your book dirty for what is, as far as I can understand, no real reason. Why not read your book after washing your hands? (If you have a severe chair shortage, then sure, I can sort of understand: sitting to read is pleasant.)


It's worth clarifying, toilet-readers don't typically shit on their books.


The books contained shit long before entering the toilets.


Rocketman the Master Blaster, is that you?


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: