"The winds of AI Winter".
"The vibes have shifted. This is still not a normal moment in AI, and we can't precisely determine how or why, but they have shifted."
"We went from 100% gpt4 usage to almost 0% in the last 3 months". "I've switched to Claude completely. Better task clarification, more consistent output, and improved error handling. OpenAI isn't on par anymore."
"Google AI Overviews being bad, bad, bad, bad (after the Gemini mess)"
"Microsoft announcing and cancelling Recall, Figma announcing and cancelling AI, McDonald's testing and canceling Drive-thru AI (this follows Discord announcing and cancelling Clyde last winter)"
[List continues with a bunch of more stuff]
"In isolation, all of these can be chalked up to strategic or temporary missteps by individuals, just doing their best wrangling complex systems in a short time."
"In aggregate, they point to a fundamentally unhealthy industry dynamic that is at best dishonest, and at worst teetering on the brink of the next AI Winter."
"Leopold Aschenbrenner says, 'So far, every 10x scaleup in AI investment seems to yield the necessary returns.'"
"Diminishing returns are real, scaling laws don't hold in economics like they do in AI, and log lines do not go up and to the right for ever when checked by physical reality."
"The final piece worth an honorable mention this past quarter, though not quite qualifying in the AI infra spend debate, is Chris Paik's The End of Software."
That piece, "The End Of Software" says (among other things): "Software is expensive because developers are expensive. They are skilled translators--they translate human language into computer language and vice-versa. LLMs have proven themselves to be remarkably efficient at this and will drive the cost of creating software to zero. What happens when software no longer has to make money? We will experience a Cambrian explosion of software, the same way we did with content. Vogue wasn't replaced by another fashion media company, it was replaced by 10,000 influencers."
"In the same way that 5 stocks account for 96% of the S&P 500's gains this year, the rollout and benefit of AI has been extremely imbalanced."
"We have mindblowing models, and plenty of money flowing to GPUs, infra is improving, and costs are coming down. What we haven't seen is the proportionate revenue, and productivity gains, flow to the rest of the economy."
