[ericd]

All those racks of Nvidia machines might not pay off for the companies buying them, but I have a hard time believing that people are still questioning the utility of this stuff. In the last hour, Opus downloaded data for and implemented a couple of APIs that I would’ve otherwise paid hundreds a month for, end to end, from research all the way to testing its implementation. It’s so, incredibly, obviously useful.

[jononor]

That something is useful does not necessarily mean that it will be doable for companies the capture enough of value to make up for the billions in investments they have/will have make in the coming years.

Right now the frontier AI companies are explicitly running a kind of chicken race - increasing the burn rates so much that it gets harder and harder. With the hopes that they (and not their competitor) will be the one left standing. Especially OpenAI and Antropic, but non-AI companies like Oracle have also joined. If they keep it going, the likely outcome is that one of them folds - and the other(s) reap the rewards.

Utility (per cost) will go up the tougher the competition. Money captured by single entity possibly down with increased competition.

[slopinthebag]

It's only really useful if what you produce with those API's is useful. It's easy to feel productive with AI tho, in a way that doesn't show up in economic statistics, hence the disconnect.

[ericd]

Well, it might actually decrease GDP in this case, because it's making it so I can just quickly make products that I would've otherwise purchased. But it's also made me more productive, and purchasing things isn't good for its own sake. So maybe measuring progress via GDP isn't ideal?

The thing I'm making with the APIs is very helpful to me, maybe it'll be helpful to others, who knows.