Comment by gkcnlr
8 hours ago
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.
[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...
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
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.
Update your priors.
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.
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> the business plan people got convicted for trying in ancient Persia, 5000 years ago.
Excuse my ignorance, do you have more details on this?
Persia didn't even come into being until 500BC
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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.
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