[alextillman]

The AI economic bubble is not because AI is useless. There was a paper recently that highlighted how AI is diagnosing pancreatic cancer patients years before humans do. This is not a one off (and not limited to science). Those who are getting these types of results across many domains understand the potential value (like the people who get a two year head start on their treatments).

The problem is that the entire market right now is set up for resolving things with hardware instead of software. Bigger models, faster chips, data center sprawl etc. Clearly that is not sustainable. But if you use AI inference for reasoning only, and traditional software like databases, web searches, etc. for the things they do well (at a fraction of the cost) the economics flip.

Trying to force expensive training updates and ever larger models that know who the first baseman was for the winning 1939 world series time is useless and where the cost-to-value ratio is broken. Pull what you need from a search api, and send the results to an LLM to analyze. No fine tuning, no super big chips and even small models can produce good results.