Have seen several like this in the last months, though in much more niche areas and with barely any publicity.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48582320

Points: 454

# Comments: 211

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language

He was also right about AI-video and sora in particular being a fundamentally flawed idea.

He was also right about the dangers and problems with the general inaccuracy of LLMs and people relying on it.

Also about the expected triggering of ROI-checking in companies, such as Uber is doing now. His prediction is, ROI is negative. And I'm awaiting the society's consensus on that.

The general direction seems correct to me. He's not a technical guy and does not have the knowledge to critique models on a factual basis. I do wish he'd just focus on the stuff he _does_ know about, which is the financial side of things.

He is a much needed counterweight to the unhealthy hype going around, imho.

I'll gladly tell my customers all the most glorious stuff about AI and big tech while spending a significant chunk of the money they pay me on supporting AI-/tech-counterculture, such as doctorow, zitron and quite a few other writers, journalists and activists.

It's the old "you live in a society" counter-point against anti-capitalist activism. Needing to make ends meet does not imply that your points or principles are meaningless, it just implies that you have no interest in being homeless and that way losing your chance to actually change things.

So that's fine to me. But: I stated it for a reason, because I know others don't agree. I, personally, consider him trustworthy. You do not, and that's fine. I suspect we both await anthropic's Z.1, which will be able to settle a big chunk of the debate.

If he is right, the numbers will show it.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

However, it needs to be said that he received those numbers. I personally have quite a few issues with him, but there's no reason to doubt his journalistic integrity. Because of that, I believe he reports truthfully on data he receives by informants.

Additionally, none of the frontier models actually publicly talks about inference costs in anything but broad, "let's just forget that"-like takes. Which does not exactly spark confidence.

I'm eagerly awaiting anthropic's public disclosure of their financial details. That should be rather interesting in any case and finally put the inference-discussion to rest.

I think it's dangerous to rely on claims made by people who financially profit from you believing them without checking.

[0]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-v...

The actual question is: would drinking that stuff with sugar have caused more damage to health? And the answer will likely be yes. Because we _know_ just how bad sugar is for you. Particularly diabetes, microbiome changes, addictive behavior, obesity of course, cardiovascular issues...

If you'd look at sugar in isolation, as a new substance that stuff would never be allowed in any country at all.

Legality isn't really of much practical concern anymore. It's about what gets/can be enforced immediately.

There is a reason anthropic is still hiding those details:

> key details typically included in that form about a company’s operations — like potential risks to its business, executive compensation, and other financials — won’t become public until later on in the process

Source: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/941016/a...

We'll see, maybe they trigger some new rule change to be allowed to keep it hidden. Wouldn't be surprised about that at all.

Apart from that, I'm not sure if focusing on tokens is even a good idea, because they are so different from model to model. I'd almost consider them a red herring now.

We could look at tasks instead. Is there anything even remotely suggesting that your typical task you give an LLM now costs less in inference than before?

The medium author has this in their bio: "healing, self-improvement, meditation, manifestation". Well, does not seem like the best source to me.

Aside from that, next you're probably going to post the protocols? Because that's where this line of thinking usually seems to take people. It's really nonsensical to focus on individual people, it's much more important to talk about systems and incentives. And, especially, compare to how it works in other countries.

Did they get to a similar place without person x? Then person x is probably not the primary issue here, but rather something on the system level.

Just like how the story of epstein is not the story of one evil person, it's the story of a part of society which deliberately enabled him and a system with no real safeguards in place.

Otherwise you'd always have to context switch, consider which git state it's actually working from, etc. - rather than just letting the code directly before you change in your IDE.

It's significantly lower cognitive load and has a higher success rate, in my experience.

But, of course: Highly depends on the software being written and the general code infrastructure.

When on an american-centric board anybody writes about "communism", I assume they refer to anything from marxism to stalinism to socialism to democratic socialism to social democracy up to anything non-hyper-capitalist. Not great, but sadly something to be taken into consideration.

Especially when looked at in context - parent was criticizing the EU initiative by essentially claiming something like that leads to a kind of monoculture like in a planned economy reminiscent of "communism", here probably meaning stalinism, from what I assume is a radical libertarian position. Which tells me the person is likely american, implying a rather ... minimal awareness of the nuance here.

Please, look at the actual comment chain and it should be rather trivial to make out what everybody is talking about. Does your comment really add value here?

As an example: you probably know that germany has socialized healthcare. It is, however, not implemented as a single-payer model. Instead there are tons of different insurances competing with each other, while having a highly regulated floor of what they MUST offer.

Is the model perfect? Hell no, it has tons of issues - though overall it's pretty solid. My point is just that social policies and "no internal competition ever" does absolutely not have to go hand in hand. There is a massive middle ground.

See: social democracy as a concept and in its current implementation.

Please prove this statement, so far there is no indication that this is actually true - the opposite seems to be the case. Here are some actual numbers [0] (and whether you like Ed or not, his sources have so far always been extremely reliable.)

There is a reason the AI companies don't ever talk about their inference costs. They boast with everything they can find, but inference... not.

[0]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

Sigh.