Comment by serbuvlad
4 days ago
> These prices seem to keep increasing while we were promised they'll keep decreasing.
A Ferrari is more expensive than the model T.
The most expensive computer is a lot more expensive than the first PC.
The price that usually falls is:
* The entry level. * The same performance over time.
But the _price range_ gets wider. That's fine. That's a sign of maturity.
The only difference this time is that the entry level was artificially 0 (or very low) because of VC funding.
But where is the value?
If it could write like George Will or Thomas Sowell or Fred Hayek or even William Loeb that would be one thing. But it hears dog whistles and barks which makes it a dog. Except a real dog is soft and has a warm breath, knows your scent, is genuinely happy when you come home and will take a chomp out of the leg of anyone who invades your home at night.
We are also getting this kind of discussion
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44502981
where Grok exhibited the kind of behavior that puts "degenerate" in "degenerate behavior". Why do people expect anything more? Ten years ago you could be a conservative with a conscience -- now if you are you start The Bulwark.
> If it could write like George Will or Thomas Sowell or Fred Hayek or even William Loeb
Having only barely heard of these authors even in the collective, I bet most models could do a better job of mimicking their style than I could. Perhaps not well enough to be of interest to you, and I will absolutely agree that LLMs are "low intelligence" in the sense that they need far more examples than any organic life does, but many of them will have had those examples and I definitely have not.
> We are also getting this kind of discussion
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44502981
Even just a few years ago, people were acting as if a "smart" AI automatically meant a "moral AI".
Unfortunately, these things can be both capable* and unpleasant.
* which doesn't require them to be "properly intelligent"
The bar is "can it write as well as these accomplished professional writers?", not "Can it imitate their style better than the average person?"
19 replies →
> The most expensive computer is a lot more expensive than the first PC.
Not if you're only looking at modern PCs (and adjusting for inflation). It seems unfair to compare a computer built for a data center with tens of thousands in GPUs to a PC from back then as opposed to a mainframe.
Good point; the proper comparison might be between something like ENIAC, which reportedly cost $487K to build in 1946, being about$7M now, and a typical Google data center, reportedly costing about $500M.
I think a closer comparison would be one rack or isle, not a whole data center.
> The most expensive computer is a lot more expensive than the first PC.
Depends on your definition of "computer". If you mean the most expensive modern PC I think you're way off. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto: "The Xerox Alto [...] is considered one of the first workstations or personal computers", "Introductory price US$32,000 (equivalent to $139,000 in 2024)".
The base model Apple II cost ~$1300USD when it was released; that's ~$7000USD today inflation adjusted.
In other words, Apple sells one base-model computer today that is more expensive than the Apple II; the Mac Pro. They sell a dozen other computers that are significantly cheaper.
We're trying to compare to the 80's where tech was getting cheaper. Instead of 2010 where tech was nearly given away and then squeezed out of us.
We're already at the mac Mini prices. It's a matter of if the eventual baseline will be macbook air or a fully kitted out mac pro. There will be "cheap"options, but they won't be from this metaphorical Apple.
That was the most predictable outcome. It's like we learned nothing from Netflix, nor the general enshittification of tech by the end of the 2010's. We'll have the billionaire AI tech capture markets and charge enterprise prices to make pay back investors. Then maybe we'll have a few free/cheap models fighting over the scraps.
Those small creators hoping to leverage AI to bring their visions to life for less than their grocery bill will have a rude awakening. That's why I never liked the argument of "but it saves me money on hiring real people".
I heard some small chinese shops for mobile games were already having this problem in recent years and had to re-hire their human labor back when costs started rising.