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| ▲ | novembermike 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Most growth is actually logistic. An S shaped curve that starts exponential but slows down rapidly as it reaches some asymptote. In fact basically everything we see as exponential in the real world is logistic. | |
| ▲ | jopsen 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | True, but adoption of AI has certainly seen exponential growth. Improvement of models may not continue to be exponential. But models might be good enough, at this point it seems more like they need integration and context. I could be wrong :) | | |
| ▲ | tracker1 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | At what cost though? Most AI operations are losing money, using a lot of power, including massive infrastructure costs, not to mention the hardware costs to get going, and that isn't even covering the level of usage many/most want, and certainly aren't going to pay even $100s/month per person that it currently costs to operate. | | |
| ▲ | martinald 5 days ago | parent [-] | | This is a really basic way to look at unit economics of inference. I did some napkin math on this. 32x H100s cost 'retail' rental prices about $2/hr. I would hope that the big AI companies get it cheaper than this at their scale. These 32 H100s can probably do something on the order of >40,000 tok/s on a frontier scale model (~700B params) with proper batching. Potentially a lot more (I'd love to know if someone has some thoughts on this). So that's $64/hr or just under $50k/month. 40k tok/s is a lot of usage, at least for non-agentic use cases. There is no way you are losing money on paid chatgpt users at $20/month on these. You'd still break even supporting ~200 Claude Code-esque agentic users who were using it at full tilt 40% of the day at $200/month. Now - this doesn't include training costs or staff costs, but on a pure 'opex' basis I don't think inference is anywhere near as unprofitable as people make out. | | |
| ▲ | tracker1 5 days ago | parent [-] | | My thought is closer to the developer user who would want to have their codebase as part of the queries along with heavy use all day long... which is closer to my point that many users are less likely to spend hundreds a month, at least with the current level of results people get. That said, you could be right, considering Claude max's price is $100/mo... but I'm not sure where that is in terms of typical, or top 5% usage and the monthly allowance/usage. |
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| ▲ | BobaFloutist 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > True, but adoption of AI has certainly seen exponential growth. I mean, for now. The population of the world is finite, and there's probably a finite number of uses of AI, so it's still probably ultimately logistic |
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| ▲ | AnotherGoodName 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Fwiw LLMs are also revolutionary. There's currently more anti-AI hype than AI hype imho. As in there's literally people claiming it's completely useless and not going to change a thing. Which is crazy. | | |
| ▲ | skeezyboy 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >Fwiw LLMs are also revolutionary iterative. we had a shittier version of this 20 years ago | |
| ▲ | lokar 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That’s an anecdote about intensity, not volume. The extremes on both sides are indeed very extreme (no value, replacing most white collar jobs next year). IME the volume is overwhelming on the pro-LLM side. | | |
| ▲ | whatevertrevor 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Yeah the conversation on both extremes feels almost religious at times. The pro LLM hype feels more disconcerting sometimes because there are literally billions if not trillions of dollars riding on this thing, so people like Sam Altman have a strong incentive to hype the shit out of it. |
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| ▲ | Jensson 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | One sides extremes says LLM wont change a thing, the other sides extremes says LLM will end the world. I don't think the ones saying it wont change a thing are the most extreme here. | | |
| ▲ | wyre 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Luckily for humanity reality is somewhere in between extremes, right? |
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| ▲ | didibus 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You're right, and I also think LLMs have an impact. The issue is the way the market is investing they are looking for massive growth, in the multiples. That growth can't really come from trading cost. It has to come from creating new demand for new things. I think that's what not happened yet. Are diffusion models increasing the demand for video and image content? Is it having customers spend more on shows, games, and so on? Is it going to lead to the creation of a whole new consumption medium ? | | |
| ▲ | jopsen 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > Is it going to lead to the creation of a whole new consumption medium ? Good question? Is that necessary, or is it sufficient for AI to be integrated in every kind of CAD/design software out there? Because I think most productivity tools whether CAD, EDA, Office, graphic 2d/3d design, etc will benefit from AI.
That's a huge market. | | |
| ▲ | didibus 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I guess there are two markets to consider. The market of the AI foundation models itself, will they have customers long term willing to pay a lot of money for access to the models? I think yes, there will be demand for foundational AI models, and a lot of it. The second market is the market of CAD, EDA, Office, graphic 2d/3d design, etc. This market will not grow because they integrate AI into their products, or that is the question, will it? Otherwise, you could almost hypothesize these market will shrink as AI is going to be for them an additional cost of business that customers will expect to be included. Or maybe they manage to sell to their customers a premium for the AI features where they take a cut above that of what they pay the foundational models under the hood, that's a possibility. |
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| ▲ | jaimebuelta 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I see the point at the moment on “low quality advertising”, but we are still far from high quality video generated for AI. It’s the equivalent of those cheap digital effects. They look bad for a Hollywood movie, but it allows students to shot their action home movies | | |
| ▲ | echelon 5 days ago | parent [-] | | You're looking at individual generations. These tools aren't for casual users expecting to 1-shot things. The value is in having a director, editor, VFX compositor pick and choose from amongst the outputs. Each generation is a single take or simulation, and you're going to do hundreds or thousands. You sift through that and explore the latent space, and that's where you find your 5-person Pixar. Human curated AI is an exoskeleton that enables small teams to replace huge studios. | | |
| ▲ | neaden 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Is there any example of an AI generated film like this that is actually coherent? I've seen a couple short ones that are basically just vibe based non-linear things. | | |
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| ▲ | mh- 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's quite incredible how fast the generative media stuff is moving. The self-hostable models are improving rapidly. How capable and accessible WAN 2.2 (text+image to video; fully local if you have the VRAM) is feels unimaginable from last year when OpenAI released Sora (closed/hosted). | |
| ▲ | realo 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | As long as you do not make ads with four-fingered hands, like those clowns ... :) https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/chroniques/2025-07-08/polemique... | | |
| ▲ | echelon 5 days ago | parent [-] | | https://www.npr.org/2025/06/23/nx-s1-5432712/ai-video-ad-kal... Typical large team $300,000 ad made for < $2,000 in a weekend by one person. It's going to be a bloodbath. | | |
| ▲ | mjr00 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Kalshi's Jack Such declined to disclose Accetturo's fee for creating the ad. But, he added, "the actual cost of prompting the AI — what is being used in lieu of studios, directors, actors, etc. — was under $2,000." So in other words, if you ignore the costs of paying people to create the ad, it barely costs anything. A true accounting miracle! | | |
| ▲ | echelon 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Do you pay people to pump your gas? How about harvesting your whale blubber to power your oil lamp at night? The nature of work changes all the time. If an ad can be made with one person, that's it. We're done. There's no going back to hiring teams of 50 people. It's stupid to say we must hire teams of 50 to make an advertisement just because. There's no reason for that. It's busy work. The job is to make the ad, not to give 50 people meaningless busy work. And you know what? The economy is going to grow to accommodate this. Every single business is now going to need animated ads. The market for video is going to grow larger than we've ever before imagined, and in ways we still haven't predicted. Your local plumber is going to want a funny action movie trailer slash plumbing advertisement to advertise their services. They wouldn't have even been in the market before. You're going to have silly videos for corporate functions. Independent filmmakers will be making their own Miyazaki and Spielberg epics that cater to the most niche of audiences - no more mass market Marvel that has to satisfy everybody, you're going to see fictional fantasy biopic reimaginings of Grace Hopper fighting the vampire Nazis. Whatever. There'll be a market for everything, and 100,000 times as many creators with actual autonomy. In some number of years, there is going to be so much more content being produced. More content in single months than in all human history up to this point. Content that caters to the very long tail. And you know what that means? Jobs out the wazoo. More jobs than ever before. They're just going to look different and people will be doing more. | | |
| ▲ | mrtranscendence 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > Your local plumber is going to want a funny action movie trailer slash plumbing advertisement to advertise their services. They wouldn't have even been in the market before. And why would your local plumber hire someone to produce this funny action trailer (which I'm not convinced would actually help them from an advertising perspective), when they can simply have an AI produce that action funny action trailer without hiring anyone? Assuming models improve sufficiently that will become trivially possible. > Independent filmmakers will be making their own Miyazaki and Spielberg epics that cater to the most niche of audiences - no more mass market Marvel that has to satisfy everybody, you're going to see fictional fantasy biopic reimaginings of Grace Hopper fighting the vampire Nazis. Well, first of all, if the audience is "the most niche of audiences", then I'm not sure how that's going to lead to a sustainable career. And again -- if I want to see my niche historical fantasy interests come to life in a movie about Grace Hopper fighting vampire Nazis, why will I need a filmmaker to create this for me when I can simply prompt an AI myself? "Give me a fun action movie that incorporates famous computer scientists fighting Nazis. Make it 1.5 hours long, and give it a comedic tone." I think you're fundamentally overvaluing what humans will be able to provide in an era where creating content is very cheap and very easy. |
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| ▲ | neaden 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This ad was purposefully playing off the fact that it was AI though, it was a large amount of short bizarre things like two old women selling Fresh Manatee out of the back of a truck. You couldn't replace a regular ad with this. | | |
| ▲ | echelon 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I've got friends at WPP. Heads are rolling. This is very much real and happening as we speak. |
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| ▲ | dingnuts 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | oh no the poor advertisers | | |
| ▲ | whatevertrevor 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Cheaper poorer quality ads means a bad time for us, people who are being incessantly targeted by this crap. Websites are already finding creative ways around DNS blocklists for ads serving. |
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| ▲ | duncangh 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sorry I’m late to this conversation but am very interested in the specifics of your comment and the micro domain of AI in studio productions and the econs of the bidding landscape as well. Contact in bio :) |
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