[minimaxir]

You are attempting to move the goalposts. There are two different points in this debate:

1) Modern LLMs are an inflection point for coding.

2) The current LLM ecosystem is unsustainable.

This submission discussion is only about #1, which #2 does not invalidate. Even if the ecosystem crashes, then open-source LLMs that leverage the same tricks Opus 4.5 does will just be used instead.

[strange_quark]

But it's only an inflection point if it's sustainable. When this comes crashing down, how many people are going to be buying $70k GPUs to run an open source model?

[minimaxir]

I said open-source models, not locally-hosted models. Essentially, more power to inference-only providers such as Groq and Together AI which host the large-scale OSS LLMs who will be less affected by a crash as long as the demand for coding agents is there.

[simonw]

> When this comes crashing down, how many people are going to be buying $70k GPUs to run an open source model?

If the AI thing does indeed come crashing down I expect there will be a whole lot of second-hand GPUs going for pennies on the dollar.

[strange_quark]

Ok, and then? Taking a one time discount on a rapidly depreciating asset doesn’t magically make this whole industry profitable, and it’s not like you’re going to start running a GB200 in your basement.

[simonw]

Then I'll wait for a bunch of companies to spring up running those cheap GPUs in their data centers and selling me access to GLM-4.7 and friends.

Or I'll start one myself, if the market fails to provide!

[nikisil80]

Checked your history. From a fellow skeptic, I know how hard it is to reason with people around here. You and I need to learn to let it go. In the end, the people at the top have set this up so that either way, they win. And we're down here telling the people at our level to stop feeding the monster, but told to fuck off anyways.

So cool bro, you managed to ship a useless (except for your specific use-case) app to your iphone in an hour :O

What I think this is doing is it's pitting people against the fact that most jobs in the modern economy (mine included btw) are devoid of purpose. This is something that, as a person on the far left, I've understood for a long time. However, a lot (and I mean a loooooot) of people have never even considered this. So when they find that an AI agent is able to do THEIR job for them in a fraction of the time, they MUST understand it as the AI being some finality to human ingenuity and progress given the self-importance they've attributed to themselves and their occupation - all this instead of realizing that, you know, all of our jobs are useless, we all do the exact same useless shit which is extremely easy to replicate quickly (except for a select few occupations) and that's it.

I'm sorry to tell anyone who's reading this with a differing opinion, but if AI agents have proven revolutionary to your job, you produced nothing of actual value for the world before their advent, and still don't. I say this, again, as someone who beyond their PhD thesis (and even then) does not produce anything of value to the world, while being paid handsomely for it.

[christophilus]

> if AI agents have proven revolutionary to your job, you produced nothing of actual value for the world before their advent, and still don't.

This doesn’t logically follow. AI agents produce loads of value. Cotton picking was and still is useful. The cotton gin didn’t replace useless work. It replaced useful work. Same with agents.

[strange_quark]

> You and I need to learn to let it go.

Definitely, it’s an unhealthy fixation.

> I'm sorry to tell anyone who's reading this with a differing opinion, but if AI agents have proven revolutionary to your job, you produced nothing of actual value for the world before their advent, and still don't.

I agree with this, but I think my take on it is a lot less nihilistic than yours. I think people vastly undersell how much effort they put into doing something, even if that something is vibecoding a slop app that probably exists. But if people are literally prompting claude with a few sentences and getting revolutionary results, then yes, their job was meaningless and they should find something to do that they’re better at.

But what frustrates me the most about this whole hype wave isn’t just that the powers that be have bet the entire economy on a fake technology, it’s that it’s sucking all of of the air out of the room. I think most people’s jobs can actually provide value and there’s so much work to be done to make _real_ progress. But instead of actually improving the world, all the time, money, and energy is being thrown into such a wasteful technology that is actively making the world a worse place. I’m sure it’s always been like this and I was just to naive too see it, but I much preferred it when at least the tech companies pretended they cared about the impact their products had on society rather than simply trying to extract the most value out of the same 5 ideas.

[nikisil80]

Yeah, I do tend to have a rather nihilistic view on things, so apologies.

I really think we're just cooked at this point. The amount of people (some great friends whom I respect) that have told me in casual conversation that if their LLM were taken from them tomorrow, they wouldn't know how to do their work (or some flavour of that statement) has made me realize how deep the problem is.

We could go on and on about this, but let's both agree to try and look inward more and attempt to keep our own things in order, while most other people get hooked on the absolute slop machine that is AI. Eventually, the LLM providers will need to start ramping up the costs of their subscriptions and maybe then will people start clicking that the shitty code that was generated for their pointless/useless app is not worth the actual cost of inference (which some conservative estimates put out to thousands of dollars per month on a subscription basis). For now, people are just putting their heads in the sand and assuming that physicists will somehow find a way to use quantum computers to speed up inference by a factor of 10^20 in the next years, while simultaneously slashing its costs (lol).

But hey, Opus 4.5 can cook up a functional app that goes into your emails and retrieves all outstanding orders - revolutionary. Definitely worth the many kWh and thousands of liters of water required, eh?

Cheers.

[keeda]

A couple of important points you should consider:

1. The AI water issue is fake: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake (This one goes into OCD-levels of detail with receipts to debunk that entire issue in all aspects.)

2. LLMs are far, far more efficient than humans in terms of resource consumption for a given task: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76682-6 and https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/the-energy-footprint-of-humans...

The studies focus on a single representative task, but in a thread about coding entire apps in hours as opposed to weeks, you can imagine the multiples involved in terms of resource conservation.

The upshot is, generating and deploying a working app that automates a bespoke, boring email workflow will be way, way, wayyyyy more efficient than the human manually doing that workflow everytime.

Hope this makes you feel better!

[D-Machine]

> 2. LLMs are far, far more efficient than humans in terms of resource consumption for a given task: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76682-6 and https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/the-energy-footprint-of-humans...

I want to push back on this argument, as it seems suspect given that none of these tools are creating profit, and so require funds / resources that are essentially coming from the combined efforts of much of the economy. I.e. the energy externalities here are monstrous and never factored into these things, even though these models could never have gotten off the ground if not for the massive energy expenditures that were (and continue to be) needed to sustain the funding for these things.

To simplify, LLMs haven't clearly created the value they have promised, but have eaten up massive amounts of capital / value produced by everyone else. But producing that capital had energy costs too. Whether or not all this AI stuff ends up being more energy efficient than people needs to be measured on whether AI actually delivers on its promises and recoups the investments.

EDIT: I.e. it is wildly unclear at this point that if we all pivot to AI that, economy-wide, we will produce value at a lower energy cost, and, even if we grant that this will eventually happen, it is not clear how long that will take. And sure, humans have these costs too, but humans have a sort of guaranteed potential future value, whereas the value of AI is speculative. So comparing energy costs of the two at this frozen moment in time just doesn't quite feel right to me.

[simonw]

> For now, people are just putting their heads in the sand and assuming that physicists will somehow find a way to use quantum computers to speed up inference by a factor of 10^20 in the next years, while simultaneously slashing its costs (lol).

GPT-3 Da Vinci cost $20/million tokens for both input and output.

GPT-5.2 is $1.75/million for input and $14/million for output

I'd call that pretty strong evidence that they've been able to dramatically increase quality while slashing costs, over just the past ~4 years.

[tuesdaynight]

Isn't that kind of related with the amount of money thrown at the field? If the economy gets worse for any reason, do you think that we can still expect these level of cutting costs in the future?

[strange_quark]

> But hey, Opus 4.5 can cook up a functional app that goes into your emails and retrieves all outstanding orders - revolutionary. Definitely worth the many kWh and thousands of liters of water required, eh?

The thing is in a vacuum this stuff is actually kinda cool. But hundreds of billions in debt-financed capex that will never seen a return, and this is the best we’ve got? Absolutely cooked indeed.