Comment by giancarlostoro
15 hours ago
In terms of SpaceX (the space portion of it) they've produced the cheapest way to get any payload into space. If you pay anybody else, you will overpay drastically depending on who you want to take your payload into space.
In terms of AI, we've seen even here on HN everything from mathematical problems that remaind unsolved, being solved, mathematical proofs being used to disprove theories, heck we even learned more about alzheimers, new antibiotics, precision targeting in oncology, using AI to flag healthcare anomalies in imaging. The benefits are easy to miss, but they're snowballing into place, there's definitely an explosion of useless crap, but you have to look for the real things and you will come to find, that AI is giving us things we otherwise either might not have discovered or wouldn't have within our lifetimes.
I have yet to see an application outside of harnesses and LLMs itself where adaptation has happened on a larger scale. Devs are fine with babysitting their LLMs. People like to use LLMs to improve their mails and so on. But outside of that, the adaptation is not there yet.
Don't get me wrong. I love LLMs and use them myself. But the biggest gain for me is easier context switch and text manipulation. It's not the: replace X with a bunch of LLMs every CEO is dreaming of. So yes, you have higher productivity, but is the eval of those companies legit? x doubt.
Markets value future cash flows, not today's cash flows.
By the time you see the applications, the market will have moved on to value the next set of future cash flows.
If the market only valued the obvious, investors would jump in to buy the price up, until it met the average expectations.
The market might be wrong, but the question is not: "Have you yet to see?", but rather, "What do you see in the next three to five years?"
Otherwise, how could investors ever invest in a startup?
Startups never have revenues to justify their initial valuations.
It's a bet on the future.
Investors are future looking.
Consumers are present looking.
We didn't see LLM harnesses coming even two years ago. Now they generate billions per month.
Investors can't wait until reality materializes to make their estimations of the future.
That's why investing is hard.
You have to try to predict the future.
One third of all software code is written by AI. At the frontier AI labs it's 80%+. It has completely upended the software industry. How is that not a massive adaption?
> One third of all software code is written by AI.
I find it interesting that using lines of code as a metric is making a comeback.
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You couldn’t have picked a better argument to show how this bias is exactly what’s making tech people think this shift is ubiquitous. “It works extremely well for coding, in which I am a domain expert, so why wouldn’t it work for all the other domains I absolutely know nothing about?”
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What is a larger scaler for you? What is "outside harness an LLM"?
What is _the proof_ if all the proofs are not _proofs_?
I don't babysit my LLM based services which are used by coaches and clients around the world. One of my LLM based solution get 30-4k daily hits and I have users coming back on the regular to use it. without babysitting, doing things that would take them hours of manual work and research.
I don't babysit the developers I work with and our clients, which both use LLM's themselves and at scale with their clients, serving all kinds of LLM powered services to millions of users worldwide.
You are not "seeing" the large adoption because:
- The technology is "a few years old" in its usable state - The corporate adoption cycle is slow - You have to understand the technology to use it in a good way, which most corporate devs and PM's do not
So it will take a bit for the "obvious" adaptation on large scale.
But you won't "know" when the large adoption happens.
Silent inference is growing every day, and that is what real adoption looks like - not an LLM being in your face chatbox, but running in the background, sorting, finding, fixing things, aligning data, figuring out analytics, tuning the ads, cleaning the datasets.
Isn't AI routinely making significant mistakes in analyzing medical imaging?
My understanding is that it’s better than doctors themselves. But it’s probably the same as with autonomous driving: the bar isn’t just “be as good as humans”, it’s “be flawless”.
It’s actually quite a lot worse than even doctors in training except for highly constrained experimental settings and a few very nice applications that are mostly too tedious/impractical for a human to do or are very basic detection tasks.
I am a radiologist and researcher predominately focused on AI.
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What are the premiums like for this AI radiologists malpractice insurance?
Last time I checked thoroughly (roughly two years ago), AI (in the form of small ML models) mostly outperformed radiologists in areas where the gold standard is "one level" above imagining wise. By that I mean that you train a model to detect on an X-ray what would normally need a CT. Or train it to see on a non-contrast CT what would normally need contrast or an MRI, or biopsy, and so on.
Essentially the cutting edge reaches up to 99% of human performance on the task it is trained, which is good enough for triage but not for a final diagnosis. However, magic sometimes happens when you train a model to detect something, which you already know is there, on an examination that is cheaper, faster or less invasive than the human"gold standard". Conveniently, this dataset exists since it's common to first do a cheap examination like an X-ray, and then escalate if nothing is found (or if something is found that you want to see better, or a number of other possibilities).
Examples of AI outperforming humans like this includes AI detecting sacral fractures on x-rays better than radiologists (who normally take a CT to conclusively exclude it), detecting potential precursors to pancreatic cancer on non-contrast CTs (where contrast or an MRI is usually required) and detecting an occluded coronary artery on an ECG without the archetypical "ST-elevation changes".
See the link below for references: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9478257/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02640-w https://rebelem.com/a-winning-hand-in-cardiology/
So AI, as a general rule, doesn't usually match or exceed the upper bound of the "gold standard" medical performance. But it tends to carry the quality of the upper bound downwards towards the faster, less expensive and invasive methods. In some cases, like in the case of EKGs, that's huge. In some cases it saves time, in some cases it decreases miss rates from tired radiologists or triages their review feed. And in some cases it's not very useful.
LLMs doesn't come close to specialized radiology models at the moment, because LLMs are more about applying knowledge than creating new correlations. Of course that's also hugely useful, but that's a bit of a different topic to unpack.
With these kinds of things, I want to see comparisons to trained, alert humans. Cut out all the distracted, stressed, tired, incompetent, intoxicated cases from the baseline. That includes rushed doctors at the end of a long shift.
A self driving car doing better than a drunk on the freeway doesn't reassure me that it'll do better than sober me in a snowstorm.
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I’ve seen the same. But I don’t see that as a glowing beacon of progress.
A whole lot of doctors, if not most, didn’t pick their profession out of an interest in medicine…
It’s so good it even sees things that are not there!
> In terms of AI, we've seen even here on HN everything from mathematical problems that remaind unsolved, being solved, mathematical proofs being used to disprove theories, heck we even learned more about alzheimers
What a story this is
What part is wrong?
People want to buy SpaceX, not Twitter, Tesla, xAI. Unfortunately Elon has been conflating the three.
Plenty of people want to buy Tesla. Not saying they're prescient, but the market cap represents that.
You'll overpay -- but not by trillions.
Sure but SpaceX can get you into orbit for $1400 per kilogram, and future projection and goal is $100 per kilogram. The competition is at $15,000 per kilogram. I think it's a no-brainer for anybody trying to get anything into orbit. Unless someone figures out superior tech that surpasses SpaceX, I'm just not seeing why anyone would spend more for less capable and costly rockets.
Doesn't SpaceX charge 2 to 3 times their internal cost to external customers? ISRO is still more expensive, IIRC they charged ~US$60 million (roughly $6000/kg) for the OneWeb launches whereas after the recent price hikes SpaceX is supposedly charging ~US$74 million on a larger rocket (~$4200/kg), but that's far from an order of magnitude difference like your comment suggests, which I assume would be using the $25 million they charge Starlink internally (IIRC ISRO's internal cost is much higher, around $40 to 50 million, but that's still not anywhere near an order of magnitude). Using internal cost from one provider and external price for another is somewhat misleading.
how many packages have you shipped so far to space? SpaceX could disappear tomorrow and most people wouldn't notice. Your satellite TV might get slightly more expensive. Those rare people that don't have LTE internet access and need starlink are exception.
> future projection and goal is $100 per kilogram
This can't be treated as meaningful, given other projections and goals (Mars colony, etc.).
At the rates you quote, $1 T (the size of the market) is 714,285 tons of stuff in the space each year. I don’t think there is enough space in space for that much cargo.
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On one order, correct, but it's still on the order of hundreds of millions to billions.
Also, keep in mind that a stock price discounts expected future cash flows. Is it likely that SpaceX will have a near-peer competitor within a few years? No, it's not, and that market share is being priced-in.
Is it likely that SpaceX will have actual reasonable demand? Their major customer is Starlink. How legitimately confident are we in the numbers with regard to price reduction vs creative accounting to offload costs to Starlink and subsidize the launches to appear to offer huge cost reductions?
If there exists sufficient demand for the product of space launches then it's probably reasonable to expect their to be a near-peer competitor soon, but that's only if SpaceX were to be profitable, which it isn't, even with the subsidization by Starlink on the order of many billions.
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There is about 3 chinese orbitallaunchers with some reusability support flying & about as much scheduled to debut this year.
But other than that, yeah - outside of China, progress has been horrendously slow & Blue Origin, the only other US company that demonstrated a partially reusable rocket just had a devastating pad explosion, destroying one of their 2 rockets and their only launchpad.
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> they've produced the cheapest way
Were we struggling to do this before? Was the overall percentage reduction in costs? Was some other achievement held back because we couldn't accomplish this? What is now enabled?
> to get any payload into space.
A limited set of payloads into space. No vehicle can get "any payload" to space at a fixed price.
> The benefits are easy to miss,
You've listed a bunch of reasons to publish papers. What is the actual ground level change that's occurred? Are those antibiotics produced? Do they actually work just as predicted? Why is that first world problems are exclusively listed but basic problems like world hunger are never even approached?
> or wouldn't have within our lifetimes.
And your life, your actual life, benefits, how?
> Were we struggling to do this before?
We literally couldn't.
> Was the overall percentage reduction in costs?
Starship will bill NASA 1/20th what SLS does.
> What is now enabled?
LEO. Artemis. Out of all of these companies, being confused about SpaceX is super weird.
> Starship will bill NASA 1/20th what SLS does
Is that before or after the program achieves profitability?
If SpaceX was only Starlink or only Starlink and rockets it would be an horrible circumvention of the rules.
But now he's also trying to get the indexes to pay for the giant cash fire called X.ai and the far right huddle Twitter too.
I have zero interest in owning anything of either of those companies.
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.
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I think you missed the core of their question: What has actually gotten better in practical terms for the average American?
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Sorry but SpaceX has done absulutely nothing for space other than take billions in GOV funding and never delivering what they promised years ago. Hell the only cargo they ever shipped was a banana...
They've shipped lots of satellites into low earth orbit, that's their starlink business and it's where all of the revenue in spacex comes from, and it is a good business in itself.